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Comment by scarface_74 | Hacker News Reader

As long as you don’t include in that number - most apps built by Google.

Is that actually true though? Most major Google apps predate Flutter. I was under the impression that a lot of their apps are either custom web view wrappers or native with shared C++ code for business logic.

Stadia and Google Pay are the only consumer facing Google apps I’m aware of that are made with Flutter.

Family Link [1] also looks like it's made with Flutter (I checked the DevTools in the browser).

[1]: https://familylink.google.com

Most of their apps are native. They learned the same thing that Facebook learned years ago. Cross platform GUI apps have always sucked - or at least since Java tried to popularize them in the late 90s.

Ads is all flutter on mobile and Dart on the web.

Fuchsia is an OS that is also using Flutter for their entire UI layer.

I think there’s more a case of there isn’t an argument for doing but rewrites just because Flutter is now a thing but in a greenfield scenario it would be a serious contender

So you can invest your time I learning Fuschsia and Flutter. What could possibly go wrong?

But that’s not demonstrating the promise of a great cross platform experience.

You made an argument saying that even Google won’t use it for cross platform.

I have some context as to why it’s both a wrong and misleading statement.

When it came to the biggest money maker of the entire business this is what they picked. When it came to a new greenfield project for an entire OS… this is what they picked for the UI.

The statements you made about “the lessons they learned” is just some stuff you made up and isn’t actually supported by facts.

Ads is their biggest money maker. But it doesn’t have to be usable compared to their consumer facing software. Even though it’s used by ad buyers, it’s more akin to internal tools that at most large companies don’t get near the care of consumer facing tools (looking at you Amazon where the internal review process website broke last April).

I used to feel the same way but Flutter is hardly a new technology anymore yet still seems to be used very little. I've dabbled with it on hobby projects here and there and it seems "fine" but not sure I'd bet the farm on it.

It’s been a thing outside the context of iOS and android for maybe less than 2 years? It’s hardly in the “it had its chance but failed” category.

Dart only survived thanks to Ads business unit, naturally they have a Flutter app.

Google can hire separate developers for each platform and pay them, investing millions of dollars into their mobile app.

Can you afford to spend money developing same thing twice forever?

I worked for a midsized health care company a few years ago (around 300 people including customer service). They had three mobile developers who supported the iOS app and the Android app.

Similarly I worked at a 1000 person financial institution for years and represented 50% of the Android mobile developer division there.

Similarly there were 3 iOS devs.

The feature set was enormous but we did fine.

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