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Comment by dgllghr | Hacker News Reader

I am considering dotnet Maui for a project. On the one hand, I am worried about committing to the Microsoft ecosystem where projects like Maui have been killed in the past and Microsoft has a lot of control. Also XML… On the other hand, I’ve been seeing so many impressive technical things about dotnet itself. Has anyone here used Maui and wants to comment on their experience?

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I've been a C# developer my entire career and spent a few years building apps with Xamarin/Uno. At my current company, we evaluated MAUI and Flutter for our mobile app rewrite (1M+ monthly active users).

We first built a proof of concept with 15 basic tasks to implement in both MAUI and Flutter. Things like authentication, navigation, API calls, localization, lists, map, etc. In MAUI, everything felt heavier than it should've been. Tooling issues, overkill patterns, outdated docs, and a lot of small frustrations that added up. In Flutter, we got the same features done much faster and everything just worked. The whole experience was just nicer. The documentation, the community, the developer experience... everything is better.

I love C#, that's what we use for our backend, but for mobile developement Flutter was the clear winner. We launched the new app a year ago and couldn't be happier with our decision.

Aside from using an esoteric language and being a Google product with a risk of shutting down just because, Flutter's game-like UI rendering on a canvas was confirmed to be quite a questionable approach with the whole Liquid Glass transition. If anything, React Native is a more reliable choice: endless supply of React devs and native UI binding similar to MAUI.

I'd say Uno Platform[0] is a better alternative to Flutter for those who do not care much about the native look: it replicates WinUI API on iOS, Mac, Android, and Linux, while also providing access to the whole mature .NET ecosystem – something Flutter can't match for being so new and niche.

[0]: https://platform.uno/

> Flutter's game-like UI rendering on a canvas was confirmed to be quite a questionable approach with the whole Liquid Glass transition.

Im not a flutter dev and Im very interested to hear how it doesn’t play well liquid glass.

It simply can't use it because it does not use native UIs, but instead mimics them with its own rendering engine. This approach worked to some extent during the flat minimalist era, but now that Apple has added so many new animations and transitions, reproducing them all has become close to impossible.

At best, Flutter can implement some shaders for the glass'y look of the controls, but something as basic as the Liquid Glass tab bar would require a huge effort to replicate it inside Flutter, while in MAUI and RN it's an automatic update.

Not a single user cares about "native ui", it's only a debate among developers. Take the top 20 apps people are using, all of them use their own design system which isn't native.

Flutter will always have multiple advantages against React Native (and even Native toolkits themselves) in terms of upgradability, you can do 6 months of updates with only 30mins of work and make sure it 100% works everywhere.

The quality of the testing toolkit is also something which is still unmatched elsewhere and makes a big difference on the app reliability.

Classic HN comment with unapologetic statements. If Flutter were that good, it wouldn't have flatlined so fast after the initial hype a few years ago. I tried it last year, only to see rendering glitches in the sample project.

Not everything is related to tech, in my company for example, they picked React Native because they have the ability to tap into the front-end job market (or they think they do), certainly not for it's intrisic qualities.

Personally I've done a 50k+ line project in Flutter and I didn't hit any of these. There's been a few issues for sure but nowhere near what I experienced with React Native (and don't start me on native itself)

Rendering glitches may be due to completely new, lightweight rendering engine made from scratch, that has replaced Skia. Shoudn't be a problem when it matures a bit.

28% of new iOS apps are made with flutter and it's the #1 cross platform framework on stack overflow 2024 survey so I highly doubt it has flatlined.

https://flutter.dev/multi-platform/ios

https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2024/technology#1-other-fram...

All those stats look great on paper, but a few months ago I checked job postings for different mobile frameworks, and Flutter listings were 2-3 times fewer than RN. Go on Indeed and see for yourself.

For a "28% of new iOS apps", the Flutter subreddit is a ghost town with regular "is it dying? should I pick RN?" posts. I just don't buy the numbers because I'm myself in a rather stagnant cross-platform ecosystem, so I know this vibe well.

If I ever leave .NET, no way I'd move to something like Flutter. Even Kotlin Multiplatform is more promising concept-wise. LLMs are changing cross-platform development and Flutter's strong sides are not that important anymore, while its weak sides are critical.

Maybe you are just not in the target market? I just checked FlutterShark and I have 14 apps installed with flutter in it.

Flutter is starting to become the default framework to build apps in in Asia at least.

And I disagree about the LLM, Flutter provides strong standardisation and strong typing which make it an ideal target for LLM.

As for Kotlin Multiplatform, maybe it will take off similarly as Flutter but that hasn't happened yet.

Speaking as an experienced desktop .NET Dev, we've avoided it due to years of instability and no real confidence it'll get fully adopted. We've stuck with WPF, which is certainly a bit warty, but ultimately fine. If starting fresh at this point I'd give a real look at Avalonia, seems like they've got their head on their shoulders and are in it for the long haul.

Would also recommend Avalonia. It's truly cross-platform (supports also Linux) unlike MAUI.

My big issue with Avalonia is the lack of native WebView control. In fact, I could not find one at all that would work OK on mobile and desktop.

I would personally prefer Avalonia (https://avaloniaui.net/) over MAUI.

I highly recommend using MvvmCross with native UIs instead of MAUI: you get your model and view model 100% cross-platform, and then build native UIs twice (with UIKit and Android SDK), binding them to the shared VM. It also works with AppKit and WinUI.

In the past it was rather painful for a solo dev to do them twice, but now Claude Code one-shots them. I just do the iOS version and tell it to repeat it on Android – in many cases 80% is done instantly.

Just in case, I have an app with half a million installs on both stores that has been running perfectly since 2018 using this ".NET with native UIs" approach.

I have used MAUI at my previous job to build 3 different apps, used only on mobile (Android and iOS). I don't know why many people dislike XAML, to me it felt natural to use it for UI, I researched flutter and liked MAUI/XAML more. Although the development loop felt smoother with flutter. What I didn't like was the constant bugs, with each new version that I was eager to update to fix current issues, something new appeared. After spending countless hours searching through the projects GitHub, I am under the impression that there aren't much resources dedicated to MAUI development from Microsoft, the project is carried forward by few employees and volunteers. If I would start another project I would seriously look into Avalonia. But I always was a backend guy so now at my current job I do server backend development in C# and couldn't be happier.

I do think server/backend is C#'s sweetspot because EF Core is soooo good.

But it's curious that it's used widely with game engines (Unity, Godot), but has a pretty weak and fractured UI landscape.

If you're windows based, I'd unironically consider winforms, it's been re-added to dotnet in windows, and is one of the easiest and best ways to make simple GUI applications.

Sadly it's not cross-platform, which is a benefit of MAUI.

I don't really understand why Microsoft didn't do a Tauri like thing for C# devs instead of this Maui stuff. It would be a tiny project in comparison and then isn't completely going against the grain like Maui is. If you want a write once / run in more places compromise, the browser already does that very well.

Maui Blazor Hybrid has a cool model where the HTML UI binds to native code (not WASM) for mobile and desktop. That is the closest you can get to Tauri-like. If you want to run that same app in a browser, then it'll use Blazor with WASM.

Because web UI for a desktop app sucks compared to actual native UI. As a user, any time that I see an app uses Electron, Tauri or any of that ilk, I immediately look for an alternative because the user experience will be awful.

Worse than WPF?

MAUI Blazor Hybrid is great if you won't want to learn XAML. Apple killed Silverlight, Microsoft kept it running for ~20 years. If you stayed close to what Xamarin was the migration to MAUI isn't bad from what I've seen.

Last time I had to create a C# desktop app, I went with Blazor Hybrid [1]. I'd say it's "Electron for C#". I don't want to use outdated stuff like WPF / WinForms, and I don't trust more recent frameworks, so for me building on top of the web platform felt safest.

[1]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/core/blazor/hybrid/...

I would say it really depends on your target. If you want only mobile, then there's different option's (see other comments). But if you want only desktop then Avilonia is good. However if you want both (like my team) then we did end up going for MAUI. However we use MAUI Blazor as we also want to run on a server. We're finding iOS to be difficult to target but I don't think that has anything to do with MAUI.

Certainly wouldn't recommend MAUI. Even using it as a simple shell with for Blazor Hybrid was noticeably harder than WPF.

If Microsoft aren't using it themselves in any real capacity, then it's not good bet IMO.

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