Ask HN: Is it worth exploring Flutter for cross-platform mobile development?

6 pointsleeeeenaaa6y ago4 comments

4 comments

If you've already looked at React Native then there's a good React-Native-to-Flutter cheatsheet on the Flutter site - https://flutter.dev/docs/get-started/flutter-for/react-nativ...

ReD_CoDE6y ago

As I know, Flutter is really good at MVP and even final product development. But in the end, nothing can be natives, Kotlin for Android and Swift for iOS

childintime6y ago

> But in the end, nothing can BEAT^) natives, Kotlin for Android and Swift for iOS

^) my edit

Note that Flutter is conceptually a completely different (and more powerful) animal, in the sense that it removes the distinction between the system code ("native") and the user code ("app").

The app basically includes its own GUI library, and only calls the system to do I/O. The OS provides the events and a drawing surface, that's all. Importantly, to the app there is no hidden state to manage (and debug).

So one might argue the reverse (also up to a point): nothing beats having access to your own state, so nothing can beat Flutter.

GoldenMonkey6y ago

sheesh! Native apps have access to their own state. Creating abstraction layers on top of native is problematic. A hybrid approach does what it does best. A generalized app that breaks when OS’s or UI standards change.

And why is there yet another need for this? Because phonegap, ionic, xamarin, react-native were not good enough.

Unfortunately, have had to code for all of these abstraction tools. There is no silver bullet, just trading one pain for another. Why learn the native language? When it is funner to debug thru layers of abstraction.

Even airbnb is moving back to native, from react native. The pain was not worth it.

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