Hacker News Reader

Comment by maxlb | Hacker News Reader

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 Tooling issues, overkill patterns, outdated docs, and a lot of small frustrations that added up.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.

View on HN

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com