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Comment by ryeights | Hacker News Reader

Flutter has a long-standing issue where every interaction is subject to a 1-frame delay on iOS (P2 since 2022)…

https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/110431

Not to mention the stuff with shader compilation lag

Sure you can find some issues if you look at it hard enough. In the real world scenario, it's very possible to ship a performant, functional app in Flutter and has been for some time now. It also brings some of the best development experiences with Dart, consistent declarative paradigm & hot reload. Like all things, it's a trade off, for me it's very hard to merit maintaining 2x native apps.

There are many, many people out there shipping Flutter apps, and many, many users using those apps. So please stop the hate maybe?

I'm not hating, I'm actually working on a Flutter project currently. I don't understand why we need to pretend like the platform is perfect

This seems like a pretty defensive comment in response to pointing out some objective flaws in Flutter. It’s fine to admit it’s a trade off, but a trade off necessarily means there are some downsides.

Flutter apps on iOS just do not feel native, that’s a fact. It doesn’t mean you’re a bad person for using Flutter.

It's not a fact, it's the opinion of a rather small group of elitist iOS super users. Native is an utterly overrated concept these days and in no way the solution to build an app with good UX. Users don't care whether you use SwiftUI, Components or Widgets. Users don't even know what a native app is. Stop acting like it's the only true holy way.

"native" is a term that has meaning, and Flutter is not native.

I’m curious to hear where you think this is a showstopper. I’ve been testing some Flutter apps lately and other than some mismatches in platform UI elements they have been smooth. I wonder what you would think of apps like Kagi News.

I don’t mean to say it’s a showstopper, but it is certainly noticeable to anyone accustomed to using iOS devices. I suspect the situation on Android is better where Google has access to the native platform code.

Flutter has a secondary problem which is (IMO) a dearth of well-made libraries and showcase apps. Most everything feels half-baked.

The Kagi News app, which I have just installed, doesn’t seem to fall into this category. But like most Flutter apps the fully Material design makes it feel very out of place on iOS. Flutter typography is still broken, with characters tracked out way too far. And the scrolling and touch interaction feels, well, Flutter-y. It’s inherent to the platform

Kagi News is definitely a well-made app but it also definitely does not look or feel iOS native.

Shader compilation lag hasn’t been a thing for years

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