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Comment by noname120 | Hacker News Reader

Why not Flutter or any other cross-platform framework?

In my experience, apps rewritten in Flutter are janky, to the point where I can spot them a mile off - especially in animations/transitions and fake native widgets (based on a sample of 2 apps which I use often and have been rewritten in Flutter recently: Philips Hue and EE mobile network).

Same can also be true of RN (or native!) of course, and I’m sure with enough work the apps in question could be made slicker and it probably wasn’t a priority; but they’re both developed by large companies and to me as an iOS user, feel pretty bad compared to their previous native implementation, so Flutter is definitely not a magic bullet.

Flutter is React Native jank times two because it tries to render the entire UI itself.

MAUI has just gone through a rough migration from Xamarin and has some maturing to do, and developers are feeling neglected by Microsoft.

Cordova is Electron for phones - just do a PWA.

Kotlin multiplatform is good, but the Compose multiplatform has only Alpha support for iOS.

I keep hearing that Flutter is bad because it “tries to render the entire UI itself”. This argument sounds good — at least on paper — because all the previous attempts at doing that failed miserably.

But — to my disbelief — I must admit that Flutter didn't just try, it actually nailed it. I can't tell the difference between a Flutter app and a native app in terms of look and feel.

Flutter jank is almost non-existent with Impeller, the new rendering engine that Flutter uses in iOS (and in preview in Android).

Compose multiplatform uses Skia, so it suffers from the same shader compilation issues in iOS that Flutter has been suffering from all these years.

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