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Comment by deeg | Hacker News Reader

How does Flutter fit in with PWAs? From a high level they both seem to do the same thing: cross-platform mobile application platforms.

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PWAs are far from being cross-platform mobile apps, Flutter (or React Native) is much better for that.

Dart has PWA support, see https://pub.dartlang.org/packages/pwa

I'd imagine it's mostly a performance thing. It also seems like Google is aiming to use this to help get more apps on Fuchsia as well. It may end up becoming the preferred method of making new apps on Android.

That would seem to indicate that--at least from Google's view--PWAs are a dead-end solution. I guess I can stop going through the PWA tutorials.

To me it indicates that they still differentiate between web and native - which I find reasonable, at least in performance terms.

PWAs will likely further rise in popularity and be very practical for good cross-platform support and ease of delivery - Flutter won't change that in the short term. In the long term, maybe it will.

Well, unless the performance characteristics of PWAs are going to be much different than that of Electron apps, I would stick to native personally.

I don't think Google has a view: go to Google I/O, you'll find in one room the Chrome team harking at how PWAs are the future of mobile apps, and in the next room the Android team harking at how their new features solidify their advantage.

There's no coherent view as to what they want mobile to be, just teams pushing their own things.

I see Flutter the same as in React Native and Xamarin, cross platform mobile UI framework that provides native feel. PWA is an attempt to make web apps/sites work as well as native, web app/site by default is "cross platform". Google is not going to replace PWA with Flutter or vice versa. Just two groups within Google with different ideas on PWA vs native dev. Similar to GMail vs Inbox, Polymer vs Angular Elements, Go vs Dart, Allo vs Hangouts etc.

Was wondering the same thing. Seems like a stop-gap solution for now until PWAs really hit their stride in a couple of years. PWAs are still missing a few features on some of the platforms, but hey Safari just now finally announced Service Worker support.

While PWAs make decent use of the lowest common denominator (browser), it comes at a gigantic complexity cost impacting both development ease and performance.

Flutter is trying to get modern concepts delivered without towing along antiquated/unneeded technology.

I'd personally be very happy with "compatibility" support of Flutter for the web, which seems to be quite easy (and performant) with wasm+opengl.

The performance difference for one thing - this comes not only from not using javascript, but also from the fact that there is no DOM to update and has been designed from the beginning to maximize use of the GPU.

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