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Comment by lxgr | Hacker News Reader

> I think right now the biggest thing holding Flutter back isn’t technological, but rather the stigma that is attached to Google’s history of abandoning products.

No, as a user of some Flutter apps I also find them incredibly janky and wouldn't want to see the technology adopted (in this state!) even if it wasn't made by Google.

As nice as it might be to app developers, why should I pay for that with noticeable worse performance? How do you even make a brand new iPhone Pro drop frames when scrolling!?

Other than that, as far as I can tell it reimplements the entire UI rendering stack for web apps (there seems to be an optional HTML backend, but rendering to a canvas seems to be the default). As somebody never having used it... why? Doesn't this break all accessibility and native UI compatibility that browsers are providing out of the box?

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I think your Flutter knowledge is really very out of date. They rewrote a rendering engine from the ground up and released it about a year ago and a lot of the problems you describe are no longer the case.

Any iPhone App that I can try to see how the performance is these days? I remember Google Wallet app was horrible performance wise about two years ago

Just tried Google Classroom on my iPhone Pro and animations are indeed choppy and scrolling feels weird

Without knowing what Flutter version Classroom was using before impeller was released and how active development is on Classroom at google its hard to say if they could easily upgrade to the latest version. Flutter has had a lot of breaking changes leading up to the impeller release so it's hard to say if they actually upgraded to the newest version although yeah it is bad that they haven't done it by now if they didn't and if they did upgrade to impeller and it's still slow that's also bad.

Wonderous is an app we've pointed people to in the past. I believe the current iOS release on the App Store uses the newer Impeller rendering engine instead of Skia, but I could be wrong.

App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/wonderous/id1612491897

Code: https://github.com/gskinnerTeam/flutter-wonderous-app

(Disclaimer: I work on Flutter)

This indeed runs much smoother than most Flutter apps I've used in the past!

If it was indeed all just due to the slow rendering engine, hopefully this will sift down to other apps.

In the end I really don't care what framework a mobile app is developed with, as long as apps don't feel janky and/or out of place as far as platform UI conventions are concerned. In that sense, me not noticing that an app is using Flutter, React Native, maybe even webviews etc. is probably the ideal :)

But my experience as a user of apps leveraging technologies like this has often shown that reinventing so many layers of the UI rendering stack inevitably leads to some form of "weirdness". Sometimes that's ok; sometimes the alternative would be even weirder, badly developed and maintained native apps. But I can't say I've ever loved using such an app for, and not despite, not being a native app. The React Native approach just seems like a better level to try platform abstraction at.

On the web, I still can't help but find "rendering text and UI elements to a canvas" incredibly weird. I could see that approach working for games, but for things that might as well be regular old web applications, there are just so many things that can go wrong... (Reader mode and password autofill come to mind, for example.)

I think that ultimately (and despite what they might claim) Flutter just isn't a web technology (it's not suitable for rendering to web). But that shouldn't necessarily take away from it as a technology for native app development. React Native is a little better at this (and actively on rendering better to the DOM), but it isn't great either.

I think that might have been true when the DOM was the only game in town. With the introduction of WebGPU support coming to the platform a lot of those arguments begin to fall apart pretty quickly.

> On the web, I still can't help but find "rendering text and UI elements to a canvas" incredibly weird.

Flutter's docs explicitly say [0] that it is not a tool for building websites, it's for web apps. If all you want is to render some text onto a canvas, look elsewhere.

[0]: https://docs.flutter.dev/platform-integration/web/faq#what-s...

But it still runs a loop like a game engine - 60 FPS? So when compared to native UI, it's like immediate vs retained mode, right?

Native iOS also has a loop, it’s literally called the run loop.

It still was when I last tried it a couple of weeks ago. Not sure if it was ever updated to the new rendering engine.

My music app is written in Flutter and I think the performance is pretty good. In fact I did some prototyping in SwiftUI before settling on Flutter and was having a hard time getting the same scroll performance on image grids in SwiftUI that I got in Flutter without even trying:

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/minimoon-music/id6478451132

Here’s some apps I’ve written in flutter. I’ve been very happy with flutters jank-free-ness. Big props to flutter team.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/heythere-local-group-chats/id1...

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/treehouse-capture-moments/id64...

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/bops-music-with-friends/id6467...

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/palace-workspace-for-creators/...

Why, because I can make an app that works on all platforms, seamlessly, and the apps on each platform do in fact have accessibility support. As the other commenter said, they have improved performance to a considerable degree. It's an alternative to React Native, not necessarily native development, and it's a great platform for such use cases.

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