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Comment by _0w8t | Hacker News Reader

Yep. Webview itself is a cross-platform way to develop things. Adding few native UI elements in addition should not take much efforts.

Flutter is when one do not want to use Webview in the first place.

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Flutter dev here.

The Flutter webview is basically a wrapper for the native iOS and Android implementations. A native Android app using a webview and a Flutter app running on Android using a webview is using the same native webview.

It is like that for a lot of the Flutter libraries. They basically implement native versions of the functionality and make it available to Flutter. The Dart language has FFI so if you want to get "even more native" you can do Android and iOS system calls in your Flutter app using languages like C, C++, Rust or even Assembly.

I was really drawn to Dart when it came out in 2012 and still use it for hobby projects. I know Google uses it internally a lot and is used in the experimental Fuchsia OS. And of course Flutter. I wish Google would put more resources into doing the next version. It appears Bob Nystrom is the only person working on it

https://old.reddit.com/r/dartlang/comments/rvqivf/what_is_th...

I wrote a fairly complicated web app in 2013 in Dart. I just updated it to Dart 2.0 and nullability and it still works, which impressed me. Someday people will catch on to Dart, probably if and when Fuchsia gets popular

https://fuchsia.dev/

Fuchsia for the time being is the Nest OS, if it ever gets used somewhere else remains to be seen, given Google's attention span.

There's a lot more than one person working on Dart!

Got any advice on how to lay out a design for Flutter? I'm a back end dev mostly, but I'd like to have a go at making a small mobile app. My sticking point is building the interface. Doing it all in code without a layout design tool to help feels pretty agricultural.

If one uses a webview, then typically there is JavaScript running there that does non-trivial things. So the application becomes a mixture of JS and Flutter. That already defeats the goal of using a single language and framework to develop the application. And when there is a mixture of two, the value of Flutter is reduced, as the mixture can be as well developed as JS + Android + IOS.

For me the strong point of Flutter is not to use the webview in the first place delegating the latter to the original cases of showing help pages etc.

Sometimes you need a webview, like for an OAuth authentication flow, which is critical to lots of apps.

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