Comment by McDev | Hacker News Reader

Comment by McDev | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Lots of businesses are desperate for cross platform mobile dev (I'm not looking at you <really well funded tech company with slick native apps>), it seems to be an inevitability at this point.

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.

Agree with this. React Native development is just a horrible overall experience. The ecosystem is fragmented in so many ways with so many strange third party dependencies. It seems as if there is no 'best practice' yet. Its performance and resource usage hasn't been great either, compared to 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.

You can actually use Kotlin on iOS, look at the jetbrains samples for Kotlin/Native. You still need to use the iOS frameworks of course but all the genuinely OS independent code can be shared.

If they can avoid the issues of RN, then Dart/Flutter could be the go-to platform for early round applications that let you build a solid cross-platform app with which to prototype your business model. It will probably never be an ideal platform for mature, premium apps, but if it serves a purpose as the place to go to build a solid working MVP, then that's more than enough to keep it around.

In my opinion, Flutter combined with Firebase (one of Google's other projects) is probably the best possible combination to build an MVP today, on both quality and speed to implement.

There's probably a market here for one-off white label apps too...

>Lots of businesses are desperate for cross platform mobile dev

I would expand that to mobile AND desktop. It annoys me that multi-platform development typically means only iOS and Android.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com