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Comment by can16358p | Hacker News Reader

SO questions by month doesn't mean it's more popular.

Whenever I search for something in React Native it's already answered in the past or has a regular React equivalent answered so I don't need to ask a new question.

Since Flutter is newer and uses a less popular language there's many more questions about Flutter. This is totally expected.

Call me tinfoil but I believe SO is really financially supported directly or indirectly to support Flutter over React Native.

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>Since Flutter is newer and uses a less popular language there's many more questions about Flutter. This is totally expected.

It's more complicated than your proposed cause & effect. A counterexample is that Rust is much newer than C++ and yet C++ still has higher volume of questions using Stackoverflow's trending tool:

https://insights.stackoverflow.com/trends?tags=rust%2Cc%2B%2...

This matches real world observation that C++ is still more popular and widely used than Rust.

I don't have the raw data but I'm guessing that even if Stackoverflow compared Flutter-vs-ReactNative # search queries instead of # of questions, Flutter would still have a higher count.

Another article highlighting Google Trends[1] shows that Flutter surpassed React Native around 2020: https://www.nomtek.com/blog/flutter-vs-react-native

[1] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2018-01-02%202...

It's normal that Flutter is growing faster than React Native.

It's newer, has a less-known language, learning React Native is very easy for existing React developers so less searches for how-tos.

It still doesn't reflect reality.

Another metric could be activity on their respective subreddits. Here is subscriber count:

Flutter: 87K, Initial Release: Mar-2015

React native 88K, Initial Release: May-2017

I think growth rate of Flutter is higher than React.

Sorry, the two year lead that Flutter has, and still being close to React Native in terms of subscribers implies React Native was picked up quicker or is more popular.

However, I do agree that RN has the momentum and familiarity of React as tailwinds.

The dates are reverse. React is older than Flutter.

I think you got date incorrect?

Yeah it should be reverse and now I can't edit it.

It's not just that: of all the questions that might come up during development of an app built on react native, a big chunk won't be related to react native at all. Those questions won't be counted for react native in that metric. Flutter on the other hand is on the very far end of the batteries included spectrum, every question that might come up is tightly related to the fact that it's in the context of a flutter app.

> Call me tinfoil but I believe SO is really financially supported directly or indirectly to support Flutter over React Native

Could you elaborate on this one?

People at SO are definitely smart and that blog post seems a bit skewed. Almost all the good sides they praise Flutter can be equally or better applied to RN too.

I try to "reverse engineer" it and think "what would have caused these very smart people to write such a lame blog post that doesn't reflect reality" and that leads me to this conclusion.

Again, I just said I believe in this. Maybe I am wrong.

In my experience, the majority of engineers evangelize the tech stack they use, even when this makes no sense. Hence => Flame Wars ;)

Many do, including me.

But I really try to be realistic and frankly can't see Flutter being truly more popular.

But just because I favor React Native over Flutter doesn't necessarily mean that I'm biased and there's no truth in what I'm saying.

It's a shill piece.

> Call me tinfoil but I believe SO is really financially supported directly or indirectly to support Flutter over React Native.

Thank you for bringing up a very good point. There's definitely manipulation going on. I've never used Flutter, but this blogpost doesn't reflect the impresion I get on HN regarding Flutter or even Google in general.

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