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Comment by rapsey | Hacker News Reader

Flutter is mainly a mobile framework. Electron owns the desktop, anyone using flutter on the web is crazy. While you're points are valid, they are kind of irrelevant.

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The marketing literature begs to differ.

The Google's own Family Link app even on web[0] is also a Flutter app.

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

Well marketing and reality is not the same thing.

Yes there's a mismatch. As a user one should dial down their expectations accordingly.

Damn, what have we come to. I cant select text from a webpage. This is not what our grandfathers fought for :(

Developers have control, if text is selectable or not. https://api.flutter.dev/flutter/material/SelectableText-clas...

That sucks :)

They shouldn't.

FWIW developers have control over that on the web too.

What sucks is that the non-selectable text is apparently the default.

That website breaks the back button, on Android...

And on desktop Chrome!

Ironically, that page just shows me "Something went wrong" which I guess proves your point somewhat.

This is awful. Text is not selectable and the back button is broken. Nice work coming from a multi-billion $ company.

Wow, the first thing I’m met with is a terribly choppy scroll rubber banding animation on a view which shouldn’t even be scrollable. Not only isn’t it 120 FPS; it doesn’t even feel close to 60.

So what's the reason to pretend that you're also a web/desktop framework? This only limits you in mobile if you have to always consider web/desktop.

Frankly just the standard practice of over-promise and underdeliver, for marketing purposes.

Flutter would be far from being the first framework to do this.

There is a use case for Flutter Web and that is an extremely simple user interface such a form or a simple workflow, which can share code with e.g. a mobile app.

Other than that I agree - Flutter web is not going to be a good choice and that was never really the goal for them, I believe.

Extremely simple user interface can be done in anything and code sharing is irrelevant for it though.

Fair enough, but if the interface is simple yet has somewhat complex validation logic, it may just make sense.

In that case, would be wrong with...a form?

Postback never died.

So then, if you want to have a really cross-platform app, ditching Flutter and using web tech for mobile too sounds like the better bet? Or, otherwise said: if Flutter is only relevant for apps, that's a pretty small niche.

> if Flutter is only relevant for apps, that's a pretty small niche.

No it is not. Mobile apps are thriving. It is desktop apps that are niche now.

> ditching Flutter and using web tech for mobile too sounds like the better bet?

Quite possibly yes.

I meant it's a small niche for Flutter to address only the apps that want to be cross-platform, don't want to invest into having "native" iOS and Android versions, but are Ok with using a different technology for desktop/web (or don't need those).

It is not a small niche at all. A ton of things are mobile first/only.

And plenty of well known companies have discovered that mastering two native stacks is still easier and cheaper in the long run, than mastering a "cross-platform stack" framework + dealing with leaky abstractions + build integration issues + having to master the native stack anyway.

Either go mobile Web, or native.

Yep, a good example is the element X rewrite

They use Jetpack on Android

https://github.com/vector-im/element-x-android

And SwiftUI on iOS

https://github.com/vector-im/element-x-ios

But both use the same underlying Matrix Rust SDK

https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-rust-sdk

So they share the core part of the app between platforms, but everything user facing is native

You know, this is a solved problem. Qt, for example, can easily do it (and has been able to do it for 10+ years, from microcontrollers to phones). And, just saying, QT is damn fast, a necessity if you want to work on microcontrollers of course. And yes, you can do it without royalties, without paying for QT, and in multiple languages (at least C++ and Python work pretty well).

(oh, and QT supports 3d, on the web, on android, on ios, and on desktop, even on microcontrollers if needed)

And yes, Javascript's advantage has been that it was cross-platform pretty early on. Not particularly fast though, not even decades later.

And everybody keeps pointing out the same shortcoming: these frameworks let you share a lot of code, but mostly not the actual "View" (the V in model/view/controller) code, due to screen sizes, whether the UI can be resized, extra functionality (e.g. statusbar/notifications/...)

That's why new frameworks come out, because "why can't notifications on Windows work the same as on android?". "Why not just share UI?". Unfortunately, there's very good reasons they cannot work the same ... So a couple years in, these frameworks develop the exact same problems.

The web target is not completely useless, if you want to add some kind of app demo on your website, it's pretty good for that purpose.

It's not ready as a full platform though like mobile & desktop, that's for sure.

Our sales team uses the web version of our mobile app to do sales presentations. It is very useful.

Then it’s not bringing something particular new or useful to the table?

Xamarin/mono already tried almost the same approach years ago and it clearly failed..

Did it fail because it is impossible, because of poor execution, poor dev experience or it was simply too early? Flutter seems to be quite popular.

All these frameworks are leaky abstractions, they only avoid mastering the underlying platform as long as people stay on the happy path.

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