Hacker News Reader

Comment by catchclose8919 | Hacker News Reader

...no comparison with Flutter or at least remarks of what would also apply to it?

Flutter is almost exclusively used by web developers in my professional and personal experience which is odd considering the lack of JS.

The types of companies that hire iOS developers and build iOS apps also hire android developers and build android apps, again, IME.

Work for a financial institution which hired iOS and Android developers and had them rewrite everything in Flutter.

It’s the natural move, it’s just odd I’ve mostly seen adoption using web developers so far.

Wouldn't be surprised if no one quoted there has ever used Flutter. The Apple dev comment-sphere is quite insular.

It's not a surprise there's zero overlap. The type of people who develop native Apple-only apps really care about having proper first-class native UI down to every detail, not merely something close enough. As you can see, for many even Apple's own SwiftUI isn't "native" enough, so at this level of detail using Google's generic UI framework is completely unthinkable.

For cases where portability or development time is valued more than having perfect Apple-HIG-compliant UI polish, there are lots of better options. Since Apple has flattened their Aqua interface out of existence down to mostly just gray text labels, even Electron apps started looking good-enough.

> there are lots of better options

Could you give some examples? Most people I talked to really hate React Native, for example. Ionic doesn't seem to have gained enough momentum. You mention Electron, but the last time I checked it's only for the desktop, not mobile. Each year new options appear, but I'm not sure they are that great.

I had mostly desktops in mind where there are more widget toolkits to choose from. On mobile it's not so great indeed. Cordova is a mobile equivalent of Electron, but often you can get away with your own native app shell + WebView.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com