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Comment by xkapastel | Hacker News Reader

I'm confused about the mentions of Chrome OS here. In particular:

> You can also publish Flutter apps for Chrome OS to the Play Store

Do they mean, you can publish an Android app and then run it with Chrome OS's support for that? How else are you supposed to run Flutter apps on Chrome OS? The only other way I see is "web" unless I'm missing something.

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Flutter apps can now target the chrome browser (preview at this point). So a chromebook can run Flutter apps via the browser OR via an Android Flutter app.

Are you saying this isn't a web framework but rather a Chrome framework??

(I'm the Flutter TL.)

We support targeting the Web (that's the tech preview we released today), and we support targeting Android, both of which ChromeOS support. We also support development on ChromeOS.

So there's not, as of now, a "native" (not using the Android emulation) Flutter API in ChromeOS?

ChromeOS apps are (were?) written in JavaScript, using similar API's as Chrome extensions, and can be installed via the Chrome Web Store. So at one time at least, you could write them in Dart and compile to JavaScript. I remember there being Dart wrappers around some of these JavaScript API's. Not sure how smooth the path is anymore or if that's what you meant by native.

The modern way would be to write a single page app using standard web API's, if those are enough to accomplish what you want, since it's portable to other browsers that way.

Is there a reason you guys are reinventing Flash under the name flutter? because from what I can tell that is exactly what is happening

What makes you think Flutter is in any way similar to Flash?

the way it is tied into chrome with "native" apis and only difference as far as I can tell is the fact it ships the "runtime" along with itself instead of it being everywhere as flash was. Resulting in massive sizes for mobile apps

We compile to JS for execution on the browser. We don't use the NPAPI or Pepper plugin APIs. We intend to work on any standards-compliant browser. (I used to be the editor for the HTML standard, so I have some skin in this game.)

What size would you consider acceptable for a mobile Web app?

Hi Hixie and thanks for replying!

>> Flutter apps can now target the chrome browser (preview at this point)

> We support targeting the Web (that's the tech preview we released today),

Sorry for asking that way, I see my first question wasn't too well received by some other people here - and I can kind of see why - but I hope with the added context it makes it more clear why I asked.

I reread the article now in the morning and I see FF and Safari mentioned. I'm just so tired of everything that for some reason doesn't work in my main browser :-/

Good luck then!

It's a mobile, web, desktop (including Chrome OS) and embedded framework.

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