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Comment by fakedang | Hacker News Reader

What disadvantages do you see with flutter though?

The jank issue has been fairly minimized with Impeller, so performance-wide, it's fairly on par with RN. The only 2 issues I seem to find are the core Flutter team leaving Google, and Flutter web being unstable (and honestly I just wish they stopped developing for web and focusing on mobile). Another issue is learning a new language, but Dart being strongly typed makes it much easier to work with than Javascript.

In either case, RN and Flutter should be used only for the MVP stage, and once you can, you have to immediately switch to building on native at the right time.

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You named all of them - jank, a new language, and crucially, long-term support from Google, who are so untrustworthy in that regard that it's turned into a meme.

Flutter is still open source with a stronger community than any of its competitors. I think it will be around for a long while. For some reason, it's especially popular in Asia, particularly India and China. There are already entire modules being developed just for Flutter in China, so I wouldn't put it too soon in killedbygoogle.

The iOS issue is a minimal issue with the new Impeller API (not sure if you're updated on that). There is still a bit of jank, but between putting out an MVP vs another month for a native app, I'd say go with Flutter for the MVP. Then switch to native if your app takes off.

The talent pool is non-existent. You’d be crazy to use tech in your stack that you can’t find people for.

At least with RN, there are thousands of React devs out there.

You don't hire for the tech stack though. Flutter has a much faster learning curve than RN, evidenced by its growing popularity among beginners. In my experience, it's not going to be hard for a React developer to pick up Dart or Flutter than it is the other way round - in fact, there are blog articles by eBay and BMW, where their tech teams easily learnt flutter and deployed production apps within a week.

Of course, most companies hiring mobile devs do it wrong. Flutter hasn't been around long enough the same way React has, so years of experience is a meaningless metric here.

Have to disagree. Yes, every experienced dev can probably pick up any other language/framework and be able to work with it within 6 months - things aren’t fundamentally that different.

But these people can easily switch jobs and it’s doubtful most are ok to hitch their wagon to Flutter - a nascent framework with basically no crossover to web development and a big company behind it, known for killing its toys on a whim.

Much easier to just go do RN elsewhere.

The learning curve is very low though, especially for JS/React developers.

Flutter did not come from nowhere, Dart is heavily inspired by Javascript and the rendering model is close to React.

The issue will rather be that they won't want to work on it due to their career than the pure tech capabilities.

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