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Comment by abalone | Hacker News Reader

I just checked out a couple of Flutter’s showcase apps on iOS. The scrolling in the Hamilton app was atrociously stuttery, just really broken. This is on an iPhone X. Then I opened it again and it was fine. Seems like it was doing some initialization work that was blocking the main thread. Not sure if it’s Flutter’s fault but I never see broken scrolling like that on native apps.

The other app I tried was some journaling app. Both of them used unconventional UI. Are there any good examples of native performing and looking Flutter apps?

EDIT: Apparently somebody downvoted this? What’s up with that?

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iOS perf on Flutter has been broken for a while:

https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/813

https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/28113

I wish the team would prioritize this more, but I guess that's Google for you.

Non-charitably, Google probably has an interest in not prioritizing iOS.

Realistically, I'd imagine that Google prioritizes less there because a lot of preference for iOS dev is to just go full native. I do wonder how much Flutter is used by Google for iOS apps though then.

Then they can stop claiming real cross platform solution. To be hones this is exactly the reason I am sceptical to use any of their projects. I never seen something like that from other companies who produce engineering tools like Flutter for example.

Full disclosure: I'm a Flutter team member who has focused specifically on iOS development.

There are a number of us dedicated to this on the team internally at Google. It's definitely a priority. Each platform has its own challenges though, and there's a very wide variety of issues that can arise that are platform specific. The more feedback we can get about what people want to do that isn't working, the more we can address it :)

Doubt it. Google is interested in supporting iOS, from what I see, but they don’t own the OS and it’s really hard getting the details right.

Ah, thanks for the links. So jitteriness is a known issue.

FWIW I doubt it’s that Google doesn’t care about iOS.. it’s kind of the raison d’être for Flutter, no? Probably has more to do with it being really hard to reinvent a drawing layer from scratch on an OS you don’t control or whatever it is they’re doing. They could be trying their best and just be hitting a wall. Often happens with cross platform frameworks.

We've done significant work on that particular issue in the past few months (primarily, caching compiled skia shaders). The issue wasn't iOS specific. If you have cases that are still problematic on the master channel (on iOS or elsewhere) please please please file a new bug with a test case so we can track down the issue.

I'm currently writing a test app that exhibits the issue on Flutter master, will get it to you guys shortly. This is already stated in the GitHub thread, but stuttering on open/app switch tends to happen with anything more complicated than a ListView with simple text content.

We logged a similar issue -- iOS keyboard is severely laggy since v1.3.14: https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/31138 My guess is it's related to the other more general jank as well, but a severe example.

https://n8.to/ that's a brand new app still in development, but I think it's worth seeing what it's capable of

Beautiful!

Thank you, this is pretty, but it is also non-standard UI so it's not what I mean by a "native looking" app. I understand Flutter has some native-looking widgets so I'm curious how they work out in practice.

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