roughike

How is that going for you?

This app was started in 2017 and it is still running today and making (way more modest than back then) revenue. It’s just that I don’t work on it anymore.

> This fundamentally does not work for anyone with more than 10M+ installs just like you can't write Mandarin and English in one script.

Well, I did work on a Flutter app with a tiny team between 2018-2021 and we had 15M installs, were app of the day, got featured multiple times in the App Store, got Google’s design award, were a preloaded app on iPhones in Apple Stores in several countries, and were overall doing quite well.

It was a very focused app though, so the size of our codebase didn’t really grow with the number of installs.

I only have one meeting a month nowadays so I might take a look if that situation ever changes (hopefully it doesn't!).

Regardless, congrats on the launch.

> the macOS app and Chrome extension communicate via WebSockets on localhost; nothing leaves your machine.

So the macOS app sets up a local webserver on some port that the Chrome extensions knows about in advance? Smart, kinda like how I had to do an auth flow for one of my CLI apps.

Thanks!

I'm really glad you liked it! To be honest, I felt a little self-conscious about some parts of it, but generally, I'm quite happy with it.

It also helps that Dart is a familiar language without too much magic!

For iOS apps, you need a Mac. Maybe (and this is theoretical) you could set up a combined Fastlane & CI integration that builds the apps using some cloud service, such as Macincloud, Bitrise, etc. Fastlane would then build and upload the iOS test builds automatically so can use them on your phone using the internal testing group in TestFlight. When everything seems fine, then you can just promote the internal test build to production. Since Flutter custom renders everything, you could do most of the development on a Linux machine and test on Android emulator/device.

For just Android, you don't need a Mac at all.

I actually don't have any experience in that, but I think that you can absolutely do it. From what I understand, the IDEs just call the Flutter CLI and Dart analysis server, among other tools to get stuff done. From the top of my head, "flutter run", "flutter test", "flutter analyze", "flutter packages get" would be the commands you'd be using the most and could survive without using any IDEs. Of course you'd lose the autocompletion along with other IDE niceties, but I really believe that could be done. One thing is you might have to open XCode once to do the provisioning profile setup, but after that you should be good.

I'm hoping someone with more experience could chime in.

Thanks, glad you find it useful! And that's exactly the reason I open sourced it - I thought there was a need for a quite comprehensive but still simple sample app for people to learn :)

I don't really agree about pushing hard on Material Design. Sure, the current widget situation might be skewed towards Material components and Cupertino is lacking. For Material widgets, they've implemented almost everything, even the most obscure ones. But I think they're pushing more for customized UIs. Meaning, UIs that don't look Material or Cupertino, but are more of a branded experience, think Spotify, Tinder, Snapchat, etc. Designs that don't really conform to Material or iOS design languages. The Hamilton app is a good example of this. Sadly, I'm not a UI designer so I went with Material Design on this inKino app since that's an easy route for me.

With your other points, I generally agree. Didn't mean to imply that it "just works" 100% of the time. But compared to other cross-platform dev tools / SDKs I've used, I feel like Flutter does such a great job in the tooling department.

For the difference in coding time, it's hard to estimate. I'd say once you get the hang of it, which for me was quite fast, it's much more pleasant and generally faster than working with native Android. Hard UI related things on Android (rounded corners or customizing the design library components) are pleasant to do and make a lot of sense in Flutter.

Flutter and Dart come with a nice HTTP library out of the box. In my experience, it does everything you'd expect from a networking library. If you're looking for something like Retrofit on Android, there's a package called "jaguar_http" that does the job.

For taking/picking images, you'd use the officially supported "image_picker" plugin. It exposes a nice API based on Dart's Futures and handles Android's onActivityResult dance for you in the background. If you're looking into embedding a camera preview in a Flutter app, there's a package called "camera" for that.

There's generally a plugin that handles the platform stuff you need to do. If not, you can always create one and use Java/Kotlin/Swift/ObjC code to call the native SDK APIs you need yourself. Having published a couple plugins myself, I've found the plugin system to be really nice.

Like I said before in another comment, there's only so much I can fit in a Hacker News title. :) I'd like to think that a lot of people use the term "a cross-platform app" to mean "an app that works on Android and iOS" though. Or "an app that works on more than one platform using shared code".

That being said, Flutter does have unofficial Linux and MacOS desktop embedders: https://github.com/google/flutter-desktop-embedding

I haven't had the time to look into it, but having seen a couple example Flutter desktop apps, it seems really promising!

Disclaimer: It's been over a year and Xamarin could've improved a lot during that time.

Coming from a Java/Kotlin background, I found C# to be really nice, but I had some issues with Xamarin tooling. I used Xamarin Studio and for the most part, it worked fine. Sometimes, there were some random crashes and project build errors that mysteriously resolved themselves. I also needed pie charts per the customer requirements and the best pie charting library I could find had licensing issues, so ended up implementing the pie chart myself which wasn't that bad.

To compare, I would say the Flutter tooling is really good, compared to Xamarin where sometimes I would not be confident with the tools. Also, with Flutter, I can share the UI layer entirely, compared to the Xamarin project where we only shared some plain business logic with written purely with C# without Android/iOS SDK dependencies. I know about Xamarin.Forms, but have no experience to compare it with Flutter. At the time the project team didn't want to use Forms, but I don't remember why.

I've been using Flutter for a year now, and I've loved it since the first time I gave it a try.

In my work, I've been using other cross-platform technologies, such as Xamarin and React Native briefly (actually currently doing a customer project with RN). In my experience, RN is not that bad and mostly gets the job done, but I've grown to like Flutter more. The tooling and documentation are top-notch ("it just works"), and since it custom renders everything, the UIs are consistent across devices and platforms. For example, with React Native I had to recently fight with a third-party library to have gradients (RN doesn't support them), but couldn't get the library working.

Another thing that I heard from colleagues was that React Native can introduce a lot of breaking changes between versions. I have a one-year-old hobby Flutter project and I was still able to run that without any pain when the first beta came out.

Being a native Android & Java guy for the last 5 years or so, having the strong type system of Dart also felt more natural to me than Javascript.

There's only so much I could fit in the title, and I honestly didn't mean to mislead anyone. I can definitely see how it could be a little misleading now that you mentioned it.

Sorry about that!

At least on Android, it turned out that if you claim that specific portion of the screen is, for example, android.widget.ScrollView, the system believes it. This can be verified with the HierarchyViewer. Some people in Flutter's Gitter group were confused because of this, since they thought Flutter doesn't draw its own widgets. While in fact it was the early accessibility implementation.

Qt is one of those things that I've heard of before, but did not know was still used for mobile development today.

The monthly commercial license fee is a bit of a downer though. I feel that a lot of software development agencies (my workplace included) are just not gonna bother with it and just use something free instead.

I agree about the C++ point with you. I have to confess I'm also one of those people who generally want to do things on a higher level. Would definitely give Qt a try if it was free for commercial purposes though.

As a native mobile developer of several years, I've always been somewhat skeptical of the various cross-platform solutions that have emerged over the years.

The WebView-based solutions weren't fast enough and sometimes behaved differently across devices because of different WebView versions. With React Native, the impression was far better because the performance actually can be quite good. But it's still hard to abstract the UI layer away when even the native Views on Android behave differently across devices and Android versions. I had to use almost a half of a day for fixing invisible drop-down menu items on some specific Samsung device on Android 4.1.2. Not to mention when you have to abstract the UI for both Android & iOS, which brings its own set of problems. It's one of the reasons why such a fundamental thing as navigation has been so hard to get right.

I feel Flutter is the first cross-platform SDK that gets something fundamentally right. Since every pixel on the UI is rendered by the framework, we as developers have better control of everything. It's going to have much better performance because there are no bridges between native and cross-platform land. Additionally, Samsung can't fuck up our UIs: once the UI works, it works the same on every device.

As a bonus, they also keep tremendous care of their codebase and they have the best documentation I've ever seen. My really simple, quick 4-line fix didn't go through until I wrote 30 lines of automated tests to go with it. After all, Flutter is going to be the native SDK for developing apps for Fuchsia, and I think Google has learned not to repeat the same mistakes that happened with Android again.