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Comment by mikevm | Hacker News Reader

I guess they don't think Flutter is a good experience for iOS apps. When you don't eat your own dogfood, why would you expect others to do so?

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I don't understand Google's relationship with Flutter. It's clearly not the basket they're putting most of their eggs in, but it got a pretty top spot in the I/O keynote this year, so it's not like they aren't putting weight behind it. I had some experiences with a Flutter app, and it's not a language or framework for me, but I for sure don't follow Google's logic in keeping it alive when they aren't super visibly using it themselves.

Most Google apps pre-date Flutter by far, and teams developing them (rightfully so) are not going to port them to Flutter.

Well, eating their own dogfood also means not using an iPhone.

You can eat two brands of dogfood.

Google is big enough to have both promoters and detractors of Flutter, and everything in between. They don't even need to choose one alternative either, they can bet on all horses in the race.

Can you build native iOS apps in Flutter?

Yes. There's also icon "packs" that mimic the iOS style, and I believe you can use different icons for different builds between android and ios?

I wouldn't call it "native" when you bundle half an OS worth of libraries with your app, including one that draws the UI with OpenGL instead of using system anything.

I wouldn't call it "native" when you're running a sandboxed app on top of an immutable base system, but our goalposts tend to change pretty frequently in the arena of consumer electronics.

Nowadays folks like to call "hybrid app" as "native app". The bottomline is "native app" is what allowed to be listed on the "app store".

I think I've seen electron apps in macOS app store? And I've definitely seen all kinds of webview-based apps on google play.

Flutter is not native. They draw all the controls themselves, so there'll always be some difference between how the native platforms feels and how a Flutter app feels (due to small and not so small differences).

Their renderer is why I love and hate Flutter. It's so easy to become productive in Flutter, but the end result always feels off-brand on every platform.

I suppose the exception is the web, where React-based rendering and CSS resets have killed off most of the native feel anyway, but Flutter on the web is too slow to actually be usable in my experience. Yes, with a high powered laptop and a JS-optimized browser like Chrome it's acceptable, but that just shouldn't be necessary.

I can see Flutter have its advantages, like on Fuchsia where "native" isn't defined by anything else and on kiosk systems where the application is the only meaningful UI that'll ever be shown, but in apps I'm just generally annoyed by its seeming popularity.

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