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Comment by TeeWEE | Hacker News Reader

Good comments. However I do see things like Flutter actually being on-par with native apps. You still need occasional deeper native expertise. But way less.

Its just crazy to think that you need to build an app three times, with different technology stack (react, swift, flutter) different UI frameworks, differen people.. While in the end it renders to the same pixels on the screen.

I do see a bright future for flutter. And its already used in some very big apps.

On the other hand: If you dont want to risk it, yeah then be prepared to pay 2x to 3x more on mobile development. And slow your development speed.

Too bad that flutter for web is just to slow and has no SEO support.

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> While in the end it renders to the same pixels on the screen

IMO a good app takes advantage of the features and conventions of each platform it runs on, and projects like Flutter actively undermine that.

Unfortunately, this seems to be an opinion that increasingly fewer people hold. I’ve always understood the business argument, but with the rise of Electron and friends it seems most end users don’t care if their software is bloated and weird either.

Flutter is nothing like Electron, you can build a pixel perfect native experience with Flutter, either by implementing it as a widget or you can use a native widget.

Flutter can take advantage of any features, it can call Java, Kotlin, Swift, Objective-C, C and WASM code. You can create a single API for common features, provide an implementation for each platform (endorsed federated plugin) and let others do that as well (non-endorsed federated plugin).

Flutter is lightweight, it runs on embedded devices. Toyota is going to use it in their cars.

I transitioned a side project from native to React Native and it was not a great story (2 years ago at least). Since my app used some native views, and there wasn't enough documentation or community behind that, every new RN version would take nights of my life in patching and getting the app to recompile.

Ultimately, I moved to Flutter and have loved the experience since (https://devbots.ai/jax.html). The main reason I was trying to use native views is because I wanted to draw some custom components (custom drawing commands + animations) but there wasn't a good story around that in RN, but Flutter gives you a canvas for such efforts, with no penalty caused by the native/JS bridge.

For mobile side projects at least I have settled on Flutter. Web is still a disappointing story in Flutter though, so its back to React for now.

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