Comment by hexer303 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hexer303 | Hacker News Reader

"I haven’t looked at Flutter for other platforms than web so I cannot comment on it other than that the general principle of Flutter is a terrible idea."

The author completely missed the point of Flutter. It is a mobile-first platform positioned as an alternative to ReactNative. Its main goal was to provide a way to build cross-platform iOS/Android mobile apps with a minimal performance trade-off. For example, its code is compiled into native machine code for iOS, Android, and desktop. Its apps tend to be more lightweight and feel snappier. Unlike ReactNative they do their own rendering so that you can have pixel-perfect consistency across platforms.

Flutter's web and desktop support is more of an experiment and a convenience for those who want to port their existing mobile apps to web and desktop.

ReactNative was targeted for web developers who want to port their existing apps to mobile, Flutter's web support is the reverse of that.

> Flutter's web and desktop support is more of an experiment

If you go to the FLutter homepage, Web is given equal amount of coverage as mobile. Nowhere does it say it is "mobile-first".

This kind of line is repeated in big letters throughout the homepage:

"Deploy to multiple devices from a single codebase: mobile, web, desktop, and embedded devices."

I'm not sure that equal is the best way to describe it. Web has been there longer than desktop and embedded because Dart came with the ability to compile to JS, but web is given nowhere near the same attention by the Flutter team as other platforms.

> Unlike ReactNative they do their own rendering so that you can have pixel-perfect consistency across platforms.

You can make an argument for this, but this is exactly what people are generally objecting to. Most people expect native apps to look and feel like they are native to the platform, that they support accessibility and other platform features consistently and don’t introduce surprising conventions from other platforms.

To be honest, most people don’t care if an application is consistent with their operating system. They care first and foremost about features.

People do care about usability. When things work as you expect, you find your way around quickly and are less likely to get frustrated.

People get frustrated and still use completely inconsistent softwares. Windows is still the most used operating system on desktop, and is a complete mess of consistency. That never blocked people from doing what they want. Just to say, consistency is great to have, but isn’t really what drives people decision making.

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