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Comment by kernal | Hacker News Reader

>Flutter is the best thing that happened to UI development since Qt. Most people don't realize how many apps written in Flutter they use daily, simply because it's impossible to tell

I agree with you that Flutter has been a boon for cross platform development, but to say it's impossible to tell you're using a Flutter app is a bit of an exaggeration. I have no problem identifying Flutter apps. Not that I care as they often have a genuinely nice UI and are performant.

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Is the complete lack of accessibility still the giveaway? Last I looked Flutter was a complete nonstarter for accessibility.

Can you elaborate? What's missing that makes you feel confident saying "complete lack of" despite well-documented accessibility functionality (including testing for accessibility)? [1]

[1] https://docs.flutter.dev/ui/accessibility-and-internationali...

I worked on the GPay flutter rewrite and our standard for accessibility was higher than almost any other app I've seen, and was a significant amount of effort spent on that. What accessibility shortcomings does flutter have?

This may be a silly question, but how do I install the Google Pay app on my iPhone?

I'd like to try it out since it's the first app listed in the Flutter Showcase, people keep mentioning it in this thread, and it probably works as well as a Flutter app can, given that it's first-party from Google.

But when I search for it on the App Store, it's nowhere to be found (or at least not in the first 20 results).

It's only for the Indian market. As Google often does, they released Google Wallet for the US market. But that's not a failure of Flutter itself of course, only internal Google politics.

Google pay was never able to fix the pre-compiled animation rendering issue on iOS where the first transition or animation is always janky and then it gets cached and no longer has jank.

That is quite a non-starter imo

How do you know this isn't the toupee fallacy?

You spotted a few correctly so you assume you always spot correctly - but there might be more you miss.

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Toupee_fallacyhttps://rational...

The setting screen is the tell. I've yet to see a Flutter app that looks like a traditional iOS setting screen.

How do you do that? I just opened my phone, and the last app I used was a food delivery app. How can I figure out if it's a Flutter app or a native one?

I don't think people are able to tell a Flutter app from any other cross platform/web framework. They just think they can.

It’s more difficult to distinguish if an app is Flutter or some other cross platform framework, but “native or not” is very easy on iOS. Even React Native, which is the least foreign, has tells.

On Android it’s more difficult, partially because it’s kind of like Windows where Google/Microsoft uses 50 separate reimplementations of Material/Fluent and there’s no consistency to be found anywhere.

I'm really curious what the specific tells are. Do you have any specific examples?

When using the apps on my iPhone, I just don't see how I could tell the difference.

For React Native it’s common for navigation to be weird compared to UIKit/SwiftUI apps. Also common for things like padding/margins to be off since standard layout facilities aren’t being used, and devs of RN apps will often visually customize controls (web style) that native devs don’t.

For Flutter, the most visually obvious thing (aside from usually using Material Design) is that its animation curves are all totally different from those of UIKit/SwiftUI and interact with gestures differently. The Cupertino theme is a poor facsimile of UIKit and lands squarely in the uncanny valley, which is arguably worse than Material Design. Flutter on iOS also tends to hitch where UIKit/SwiftUI don’t.

There's likely things we missed but we'd love to find examples you might have. We try to be scientific as much as we can https://github.com/flutter/flutter/pull/122275 [coincidentally a community contribution from someone who didn't have to fork :)]

Disclaimer: used to work on some of these animations

Yep, same. For me the animations are a dead giveaway if an app is using flutter. That, and the scrolling just feels _off_ in a way I can't quite describe and is a little clunky.

I had been building stuff with flutter for a while when GPay migrated to it and I could straightaway tell from the performance that it was flutter.

Ah, so we talking about two different things here:

a) with any given UI design, distinguishing if it's implemented using native UI framework or with Flutter

b) Flutter app providing 100% indentical look&feel to Cupertino/MaterialDesign/WinForms/Cocoa/etc.

I was talking about a). Assuming that the app developer wants to have a consistent app design across platforms, which probably came from a design department – there is virtually no way to distinguish. Ultimately, it's just a bunch of pixels spit out onto the framebuffer.

You can install FlutterShark, it lists all Flutter apps on your device

There are obvious tells an app is non-native. One of the easiest is to view the settings screen. Setting screens on native apps usually all look the same. I haven't seen one Flutter app that has replicated it.

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