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I would love to learn more about your experience. Would you be willing to file an issue and either post it here or CC me on it?
flutter.dev/support
146 karma · joined August 20, 2017
I would love to learn more about your experience. Would you be willing to file an issue and either post it here or CC me on it?
flutter.dev/support
I guess I would like to think we are betting on the web. :) All of the Flutter founders came from Web backgrounds. After years of attempting to make the Mobile web awesome, we forked Chrome and built a new thing. Now we're bringing it back to the Web.
The web is a big tent. I think there is a lot of room for innovation here. We're attempting with Flutter to push on some of the newer aspects of the Web. There are still some pieces missing from the Web to make things like Flutter really shine (e.g. a multi-line text measurement API could help get rid of a ton of code in Flutter Web). As you saw in the keyonte today, we're working with Chrome to continue to improve life for developers.
I don't think Flutter will ever be the right solution for all of the Web. Certainly not today. For example, we don't even support SEO or great indexability yet (although it's long been planned for and will be coming soon).
I just want to believe we can do better. We, developers, can all push development (including the web) to be better. Hopefully Flutter will do it's part.
I really appreciate the feedback. We clearly have more work to do on the Web side of Flutter. Unlike the Mobile side which has shipped 100,000s of apps, the Web side may be up to like 1000. :) So many more issues to address as we work closely with more users to get their apps into production.
If you'd like to track progress on any of these, I'd encourage you (or anyone else reading) to please file issues at flutter.dev/support. We read (and try to address) each and every one which comes in via Github.
We were also not satisfied with the performance of the initial GPay release. We've been working with the GPay team the last couple months and have made significant improvements within both Flutter and the GPay app. Hopefully the next release of GPay will be out soon and others will be able to see the progress we're continuing to make with the team.
Accessibility is actually a really big deal here on Flutter (Ian Hickson and I both worked on Accessibility in browsers for years). AX is something I feel we've done pretty well with on iOS and Android. Web is still pretty early days, but many AX features should work already. We have more AX work to do on web yet. We've not yet taken any Flutter Web apps through Google's accessibility testing processes similar to how we've done on the mobile side, but I expect we will soon.
Still relatively early days for Flutter Web, so I would not be shocked if it's not buttery everywhere. However, we would certainly love to learn more. fluter.dev/support has links as to how to file an issue if you're interested.
https://flutterplasma.dev/ is one demo to try. We expect to be updating flutter.dev/web and flutter.dev/showcase to update more over time.
I replied above as well. My team has also not been satisfied with the performance of the GPay app on all devices. We've been working with the GPay team since release and made many improvements in both Flutter and the GPay app. I expect there will be an updated GPay app soon, with still more performance improvements in the pipeline.
The initial GPay Flutter release definitely had some performance rough spots. We've learned a lot from working with that team since release and have made resulting changes in both Flutter and the app code.
GPay hasn't released since December last I checked, but I expect the next release should perform better on both iOS and Android and we will be continuing to work with them closely over the coming months.
I've seen Flutter run in lots of places, including desktops. Desktop isn't something my team is actively developing at this time (we're very focused on making mobile awesome), but we're definitely not stopping others from doing so. There is even another team at Google experimenting with the idea:
In general Flutter takes the position that Flutter should not limit your choices and your apps should be able to do anything the phone can do. Flutter apps are just iOS or Android apps, you can always open up the ios or android sub-folders and write as much Obj-C/Swift or Java/Kotlin code as you like.
Flutter's core engine/framework are all about providing portable UI, and leave everything else up to "plugins" (the opposite of say the Web were everything is baked into the core platform). Lots of plugins exist today, but there are always more to write: https://pub.dartlang.org/flutter https://flutter.io/developing-packages/ https://flutter.io/using-packages/
Responses to your specific asks:
Showing arbitrary native views inline with other Flutter content is actively in progress: https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/19030 (already possible to show views to the side of/on-top-of a FlutterView of course).
Full inline Google Maps is similarly in progress: https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/73
There are several community authored plugins for geolocation e.g. https://pub.dartlang.org/packages/geolocator.
AR is not something I've seen any work on yet, but it's always possible to throw up a full-screen ARKit/ARCore view using ObjC/Java your otherwise-Flutter-built app.
Flutter includes BoringSSL as part of it's runtime, some encryption APIs are exposed, there is probably more for us to do here. There is also pure-Dart crypto, e.g. https://pub.dartlang.org/packages/crypto and of course always possible to write your own wrappers around iOS/Android APIs (which someone may already have done too).
Audio/Video plugins exist today, e.g. https://pub.dartlang.org/packages/video_player
Some storage plugins exist (e.g. https://pub.dartlang.org/packages/sqflite), definitely more to write here.
Always more to do. If there is something specific you believe my team should help provide, please let us know: flutter.io/support. Hope that helps!