In the meantime React Native has come along and I don't think it's made a good name for itself in the mobile dev world. RN projects get littered with poorly implemented third party libraries that aim to bridge a piece of native functionality or SDK into the react context. I've just spent the last 6 months as a contractor running around fixing companies' RN apps for Android that had obscure build issues and dependency problems, along with all the weird UI stuff that just doesn't work the same as it does on iOS and it's not been fun.
After playing with Flutter for a bit it looks great. I just hope it isn't susceptible to the same issues I faced with React Native.
After messing with it for a couple of months, I would much, much rather duplicate my work with native Swift and Java/Kotlin codebases than one huge spaghetti code javascript codebase that I don't understand.
There's probably a market here for one-off white label apps too...
I would expand that to mobile AND desktop. It annoys me that multi-platform development typically means only iOS and Android.
It's really not unlike the web platform. If you're in the semi-narrowly supported "good" path it's great, but if you hit the limits of things you're pretty much immediately out of options.
And also really bad interop with some really critical components like WebView.
Does it have a Websocket client?
Just that once you do that you're no longer a portable cross-platform app, and there's limits to what you can do with that pipe in terms of data marshaling and the overhead from that.
Short version: Flutter is growing nicely
Have you tried Xamarin?
It's worth learning the language because you can use it in so many places. It's not a case of "learn a new language for platform xxx."
I think if you want a fully themed app that looks the same across all environments, you should go with Flutter.
If you want an app that looks the same as other native apps on the target environment, you should go with React Native.
Afaik the main alternatives, RN and Web (for fully reusable UI) are both heavy and don't feel that native either, yet are popular with developers.
Much better IMO to go for a "minimalistic", neutral interface where people won't always be comparing your app to better native controls.
You are not a typical user, you will notice things most ordinary people would never think to notice. The vast majority of apps on a phone aren't even kept open by a user long enough for it to matter.
I say this as someone who prefers native controls, has written/launched apps in ObjC/Swift/etc. There's increasingly little reason to bother with the stack.
I dabble in Android and Linux as well ;)
> You are not a typical user, you will notice things most ordinary people would never think to notice. The vast majority of apps on a phone aren't even kept open by a user long enough for it to matter.
Agree on both counts, but I like to think that users aren't completely clueless. There are certain things that they do feel acutely: animation physics that differ from the system's (particularly for things like scrolling), lag, choppiness, lack of proper accessibility support…
> There's increasingly little reason to bother with the stack.
I disagree with this (this isn't just an iOS thing, by the way: I would say the same for every other platform I've interacted with). It is almost certain to be the case that the team that wrote the platform libraries is smarter, better, and cared more than you did about the UI (there are some very notable exceptions, but I think it's very obvious when this is the case). Going with the native stack means lock-in and sometimes more work, but in exchange you get a significant amount of functionality "for free" (sometimes without even realizing that this functionality existed) and automatically share a common design language with the rest of the system, which is a usability plus for users almost all of the time.
However, they will likely find it harder to use without an explanation why. If most of the apps a user uses follow the guidelines of Android/iOS, and they are primarily a user of one platform, and your app doesn't follow either, it seems obvious that they won't be able to use their built-up knowledge of how apps work in general to navigate your app.
Most people I know, including myself, have found it initially a little more difficult to navigate around apps from the platform other than the one we are used to using daily.
Apps that insist on creating the same UI on both platforms can be a mixed bag, IMO. Sometimes executed well, sometimes poorly. Because of this, I usually prefer apps that separately comply with each platform.
I am however interested in playing around with Flutter soon!
Helping older relatives who find touchscreens to be disconcerting (due to mistaken touches that they don't instinctively recover from by hitting the back button), I think native look and feel doesn't go nearly far enough to make things easy to use, for some audiences anyway.
I just checked my 8 most commonly used apps, exclusing Chrome / Gmail, FWIW I am using Android.
1. Spotify - Doesn't follow any sort of UI standards. Also randomly decides to go into drive mode.
2. Clock - Built in, follows guidelines. About 50% of the time I hit the "trash" icon when I want to reset a countdown timer.
3. Development tool, not counting this
4. Libby, awesome app to checkout books local libraries. They have some seriously cool (but not always discoverable!) UI elements that custom solve problems that have. Their audio scrubber and speed changer for audio books are really cool.
5. Tabata timer - Doesn't follow any guidelines, really really needs a "stop" button instead of relying on back button to stop a workout.
6. Audible - Custom purpose driven UI, similar to Libby but different enough it can be a bit troublesome going back and forth.
7 and 8. Games, always have a custom UI, no problem using them.
tl;dr normal doesn't exist.
And lesson #1 in why to always follow some/any kind of UI standard.. Luckily their algorithms/service are decent.
One of my competitors has a native app, but they require an internet connection, and saving a data point has substantial lag. Parts of the UI (a graph) require a few seconds to be fully loaded, whereas my stupid Ionic app renders much bigger graphs much faster, has no "saving" lag, works offline etc.
My point is: you can screw up a native app easily as well, especially if you don't keep in mind what's blocking and what is not. Sure, at the end of the day, you can squeeze more performance and a better feeling out of a fully native app than anything Cordova-based, but this 5-10% optimization is something that non-techies really don't care about (unless maybe your app has no other USP).
I've never really considered it to be a problem. The thing that looks like a play button makes the media start, the square makes the media stop. The speech bubble looking thing makes some sort of conversation happen, and the photo looking icon either opens a camera or lets me add a photo from my camera roll. That last one gets a bit annoying.
But I seriously don't care. So long as every app is consistent with itself. The number of apps that follow "platform guidelines" is astonishingly small, typically those from the OS creator (Google or Apple) and people who used the sample template and who didn't bother to customize anything.
Which is another thing, if an app looks too much like other apps, it looks cheap. Sure I want proper back button and keyboard integration (numeric inputs should use the numeric keyboard and so forth), but apps that look like they fell out of a sample catalog don't feel premium.
There isn't a consistent "this is how all retail stores are decorated" standard, there isn't a set of mandated "this is how all grocery stores are laid out" regulations, why in the world do people go around insisting that all apps should look the same?
Sure, use the default platform picker if it is appropriate, but if it isn't (and finding the year picker on the Android date picker is darn nearly an easter egg, and Android's keyboard entry for time is also not up to snuff), then use something else!
I give 0 cares if an app has properly rounded text inputs. What makes an app feel good is nice animations, no stutter performance, quick load times, and a self-consistent look and feel.
The Mac has a profound depth of power-user acceleration: keyboard navigation, keyboard shortcuts, modifier keys, drag and drop, context menus, type-select, arrow keys, etc. Learning this stuff isn't wasted because it applies to every app (or at least that's the vision).
Controls look consistent, which signals to the user that their knowledge applies here.
Mobile obviously needs different UI paradigms, and yet it doesn't really have much of anything. There's still no good convention for basic operations like Undo. And part of the reason is that every app has to be a snowflake.
This is an example of following an established convention, much like the conventions of the platform.
> But I seriously don't care. So long as every app is consistent with itself.
What if every app invented its own symbols for play and stop?
That'd suck.
But I don't care about the shadows, or lack of, on buttons.
Nor do I care about the exact animation that happens when transitioning between screens.
There certainly are poorly written / optimized RN apps. There are also apps that due to their nature/goal shouldn't be RN even at an early stage. (Startup, navigation, threading, network issues for one). However, I would argue that a properly written RN app, within the confines of the problem RN attempts to solve, does not feel heavy and is actually indistinguishable from native.
From my experience I would surmise a lot of badly performing RN apps stem from poorly written JavaScript, especially bad state management (lots of devs who perhaps have only written web JS in the past?).
Vs. what you can do natively it has severe limitations and the documentation isn't the best (though I think it has improved recently).. but feels native to me.
I only want them to get the job done and then get out of my sight, so I don't care about the UI being pretty. I would say "elegance is reserved for desktop PCs", but those are ugly too (x86 is horrible, all OSs suck).
Funny thing is, that it is emulated on Android as well.
(Accessibility not so much unfortunately, but that is a work in progress.)
If you can tell that we're not using OEM widgets, we consider that a bug. Please file it and explain what the difference is. We're definitely not perfect, but fidelity is a high priority for us this year.
https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/new?template=BUG.m...
That said, I do understand that many people want the seeming of a native app, even if there's a bit of a blowout in size and performance... it's just not my cup of tea however.
Here's a (random) post talking of performance of Native vs Flutter vs RN: https://thoughtbot.com/blog/examining-performance-difference...
>I feel confident in saying that a native Android app will perform better than either a React Native app or a Flutter app
By bypassing the target environment's native controls, they're paying more heavily in render code, but they're getting rid of all of that propagation of pain to higher up the development stack. As a developer, that's a cost I'm willing to pay.
(* For reference, I have used Flutter, Xamarin, React Native and Java at various points in time, and Flutter has very rapidly become my preference. It has a consistency that I appreciate. But of course, ymmv.)
In practice, we've found many apps these days don't even try to use the OEM UI style. Instead, they make "branded apps" with very customized widgets. Flutter really shines at this; it's very easy to make custom widgets. (Indeed, all our widgets, including the ones that look like OEM widgets, are just "custom widgets"... it's because it's so easy to make high-quality custom widgets that we're able to make OEM-like widgets so quickly.)
I agree simply for the reason that native simulation is a moving target and not something that can ever be truly complete. If you push your app into production and never release another update then your app will atrophy over time as updates to native UI widgets outpace your application's UI; not so with native or RN. You're also betting on the fact that maintainers will make updates to the rendering engine in a timely and comprehensive fashion in perpetuity.
By simple I mean that you don't need anything special from the device, no access to the sensors, no deep integration with the OS.
I think that enterprise apps would be an obvious target (because otherwise, for most of these small apps, the first question to answer is why not just have a website?)
For everything else, go native.