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Comment by lbacaj | Hacker News Reader

While I like react Native, in my opinion Flutter from Google is proving to be far more superior as a cross platform app development technology. The apps are incredibly fast, feel far more native, and are actually fairly easy to build.

I went down this path of trying both and ultimately ended up building my side project with flutter. My project is a cross platform App that reads articles to you using some great sounding open source AI/ML models by converting any article to audio so you can maximize that dead time on your commute.

This is a little self promotional but if you want to see what’s possible with Flutter, you can check it out here:

https://articulu.com

Edit: while I get folks may be upset with my comment and are down voting me, I’ve geniunely worked with both technologies so I’m not just making this up.

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You've promoted your startup in almost every top level comment you've made in the last month, maybe give it a break?

Well, it’s a side project right now but I hear you..

I am trying hard to making sure to comment on things that are relevant and trying to add value with a little self promotion sprinkled in and I’m sorry about that but the feedback has been incredibly useful.

My only problem with Flutter is that Dart is a hard sell from an organizational perspective. We'd have to justify teaching our engineers a language they'll only ever need for the purpose of using one mobile app framework.

Taking a quick look over Dart’s syntax it doesn’t look very difficult to learn. If folks know a C-like language it looks pretty familiar. I’d guess people would spend a lot more time learning the Flutter API, etc than Dart.

For a lot of people it's not only the difficulty of learning, but also people get weary their skills might not be marketable for their next job. Marketability goes the other way too-- will this programming language be points-against by future prospective employees?

There's also developer experience-- there's a ton of tools available for JavaScript, developed by people across the industry-- and long-term maintainability. JavaScript has a solid record of backwards compatibility and multi-platform support, plus lately its been getting lots of cool new features. Adopting Dart could sound like becoming too dependant on Google and the decisions they make, especially considering that forking or migrating a programming language is a harder than doing so with libraries.

I don't know how big all these concerns would are when considering Dart, but it's things organizations thinking of switching/adopting a new programming language need/tend to think about ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

You're being downvoted because people disagree with you.

I've researched both, and Flutter is far from superior.

They don't have a production way to target desktop platforms, and it's not a native experience, it's an emulated UI. It's noticeable on iOS.

Also noone wants to learn a language from Google just for it to be abandoned in X years.

Even if they don't abandon the language, how can you expect Flutter, which hinges on them updating the renderer for every release of iOS to match the native look and feel (which it fails at right now), to stay alive? Google can barely maintain a chat app let alone emulate a UI that isn't theirs.

And this is all for an experimental OS they haven't even put full faith in yet.

Hi, I'm working on said emulated UI :) and absolutely value community input on our prioritization. There's definitely still many things that are work in progress for iOS (https://github.com/flutter/flutter/projects/9), though we'd love to get your thoughts on what are the most noticeable failures as well.

> feel far more native

I don't see how emulated native controls can feel more native than actual native controls.

Give it a shot before you knock it, Flutter uses its own Native rendering engine written in C++. It is very fast and responsive.

It might be fast and responsive, but correct it is not. Flutter's widgets don't feel "native"; they feel like someone made a somewhat poor facsmile of the real thing because that's exactly what they are.

When you want your UI to stand out you would anyway move from native look. Flutter is very good for that.

As a user, I don't want your UI to "stand out". I want it to be consistent with everything else, so I don't have to re-learn what a button looks like. For me at least, attempts to do "branding" in this manner backfire big time - I'll recognize the brand alright, but now I have a strong negative association with it.

They are already different on each platform be it iOS android or web. Consistent for me would be same in all platform which would be a browser for most cases.

Yeah, no. I don’t want your UI to stand out, and if it does it stands out for breaking my expectations of how I expect apps to work on this platform. Every platform has a couple of things that are considered “acceptable” to customize (fonts, logos, colors) and things that are sacred and inviolable (accessibility, text editing, system API). Apps that use Flutter cannot tell the difference, and use experience suffers.

Browser apps are not native and users have accepted it. What you abt users experience might be different from theirs.

Not emulated. Painted at the OS level, same as native controls. Uses https://skia.org/. I second the grandparent poster's opinion about runtime speed and developer productivity, but Flutter is still not mature enough for production.

You are correct but I obviously disagree on not mature enough for production, I’m in production with paying users. :)

I'm glad to hear that. Let me know your experiences. We've a customer base of about 0.5 million, and ours is a mission critical system. Which is why I'm currently reluctant to use Flutter, even though I'm a huge fan.

They’re “emulated” in the sense that they are custom widgets designed to mimic the appearance and behavior of widgets from the OS’s native UI framework. They’re fine from a performance perspective, AFAIK, but you run the risk of the replicas imperfectly emulating some aspect of the originals’ behavior and creating an “uncanny valley” effect.

Emulated in the sense that it's a separate rendering of the components versus using the OS's components directly.

You're right; what word would fit something that is not the real deal, but is crafted in a way to be almost indiscernible? Would it be, emu... emula... oh it's just on the tip of my tongue.

I know your post appears self promotional and is slightly out of context but I'm glad you posted it. I've been looking for an app like yours for years and the audio quality is pretty good. I realize that text to speech of this quality has only been around for a year or two.

The app UI feels native on Android and performs well.

I downloaded this to see if VoiceOver support is still as broken as it used to be and its surprisingly functional. And it really is fast. I can still "feel" that it‘s not native, but it actually might be close enough.

You should put labels on your image buttons though.

Thanks for trying it and for the feedback.

Why would a Flutter app “feel more native” than RN, which actually uses native widgets?

Disagree strongly.

While the build chain, documentation, marketing etc is nicer - it definitely has an uncanny valley situation going on in iOS at least. It NEARLY feels native.. but something's not quite right.

Also rendering performance really sucks on the XS Max. Even the most basic of list view examples will drop frames.

This is on me :S I created a lot of those widgets on iOS. I'd really like to learn more from your experience however. What would you say are the main things that made it feel off?

Here's otherwise a list of things we're working on right now https://github.com/flutter/flutter/projects/9.

Can you point me to these open source AI/ML models? I'd like to learn from these.

Can flutter compile to browsers?

Apparently not yet.

Addition of PWA support would be quite compelling. If you then added in the ability to swap Dart with, for example, TypeScript, then Flutter adoption would explode.

The "code once, run everywhere" landscape is filled with compromises at the moment.

Dart already failed once on the browser, Flutter is just its last hope to stay relevant.

Sounds interesting but why do you have to sign up for this?

I do plan on adding social logins but it’s incredibly expensive to run ML and NLP models in the cloud so I end up charging after 30 articles per month.

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