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Comment by willdr | Hacker News Reader

Rewritten *into* Flutter? People should be rewriting away from Flutter.

https://blog.zulip.com/2025/06/17/flutter-mobile-app-launche... and the previous blog post linked from there gives some context as to why we rewrote the Zulip mobile apps from React Native to Flutter.

Our Flutter experience over the last few months since launch has been very positive. Most importantly, development velocity is much faster than it was on React Native.

To what? What is the alternative?

Expo/RN TBH.

Looks to be some sort of subscription licensed framework, and lacks desktop support. Why should I move off an open source platform onto a hosted solution? Especially in the context of OP’s situation.

It's just react native tooling

Native is also a good option, for something used that extensively.

Flutter compiles to native though? I’m not sure I understand what you are saying.

Flutter "compiles to native," but the UI is just a giant canvas they paint themselves. React Native uses real native views, so you get actual platform widgets, accessibility, and OS-level optimizations instead of shipping your own game engine.

Also, Google has a habit of hyping projects then quietly killing them (I sadly took the Polymer ride).

I believe Flutter was chosen because of somewhat easy way of keeping common codebase for both iOS and Android clients. Not trivial, and at least it renders natively :V

Makepad looks really promising

Why?

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