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meerita 6 hours ago [-]
I still prefer React Native with Expo over Flutter, mostly for practical reasons:
* Language and hiring: TypeScript has a much larger developer pool. Dart is a solid language, but finding experienced Flutter engineers is harder.
* Platform model: React Native maps much more naturally to native platform concepts. Flutter owns much more of the rendering stack, which is powerful, but also creates another abstraction layer between the app and the platform.
* Performance: Flutter can absolutely be fast, so I would not claim otherwise. My experience, however, is that RN has required less work to get interactions and animations that feel consistently native.
* Ecosystem: RN benefits from the broader React, TypeScript, JavaScript, and native ecosystems. Expo has also improved dramatically and now covers a large part of the usual mobile platform work.
* Platform-specific features: neither framework completely eliminates native code. Things like widgets, Live Activities, Dynamic Island, extensions, NFC, and other platform APIs eventually bring you back to Swift/Kotlin anyway.
* Migration to native: if the long-term destination is Swift and Kotlin, I find RN a better intermediate representation. Its component model and platform integration are closer to native concepts, which also makes the codebase easier for agents to translate incrementally into proper native applications.
That said, these are trade-offs, not claims that Flutter is bad. Flutter has improved a lot, and for teams that want a highly consistent cross-platform UI, its rendering model can be an advantage.
wiradikusuma 5 hours ago [-]
You should try Dart/Flutter again, they've improved a lot.
- Dart. It's richer than JS/TS with stronger type safety, and seems purpose-built for UI. Fewer Dart developers than JS, but I'd argue those JS developers cannot be immediately effective coding React Native (Expo) anyway.
- Emulated components vs. real native components. For multi-platform apps, this is actually desirable. These kinds of apps have their own design system.
- Speed. In my experience, it's negligible, but maybe because I keep using the latest version.
- Ecosystem. Flutter/Dart occasionally introduces "breaking" changes (such as migration to null safety, and recently deprecation of CocoaPods). Community very quick to update their plugins and adapt. Some abandoned plugins were immediately forked to keep being maintained.
- Migrating to native platforms, easier for agents to read an RN project. I'd argue it should be _easier_ to do that with Dart since the language is less "ambiguous" than JS.
However it's not perfect. My complaints:
- Not ideal for web apps with lots of FIRST-time visitors, due to initial download. There are some attempts to solve this, e.g. deferred loading, but I think inherently it's unsolvable since you need to download the whole world (a few MBs) to have the app running on your browser. That's why for this scenario I use SvelteKit. But if you already have a mobile app and want to get a web app "for free", this is a useful feature.
- WebView support is inconsistent across platforms (I'm looking at you, Windows and Linux).
- Text fields are quirky on Android TV.
tancop 3 hours ago [-]
> it's unsolvable since you need to download the whole world (a few MBs) to have the app running on your browser
another reason why the web should move from whole app bundling to content addressed CDNs for library code. you would only need to download one copy for each framework version not every site. and its easy to make it decentralized with IPFS if you want.
They still haven't got native scrolling perfect for iOS. I used a big name app just today and I could instantly tell without looking it up that it was a flutter app, because the scrolling felt non-native.
satvikpendem 2 hours ago [-]
This is fixed in the past few versions of Flutter, they likely haven't updated their SDK.
zigzag312 3 hours ago [-]
Scrolling is like an Achilles' heel of Flutter. There's still no smooth scrolling with mouse for web.
meerita 5 hours ago [-]
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hypendev 5 hours ago [-]
As someone who used all these frameworks professionally for years, I highly agree. Although, I do not prefer Expo due to it's highly annoying build system and dependency hell, but React Native itself in that case. While I understand Google wants a horse in this race, Flutter doesn't feel like a horse to bet on.
- Dart is a really _ugly_ language with lots of tiny annoyances. Its as if someone took worst parts of Java and Javascript and turned them into a language. Terrible to write, terrible to read, terrible to use.
- While there is no Skia anymore, the whole custom rendering of Flutter often caused more trouble than not, from the UI implementation itself all the way to specific low-end chipsets not being supported.
- Ecosystem propagates these insane architectures that don't make much sense and are made to either print apps as fast as possible or to emulate some Clean Code like behavior.
- Web still feels terrible to use, even after all these years.
Since I'm not happy with any of these, I've even taken upon writing a framework of my own that renders into native UI and works with any language (gonna shill it here https://hypen.space). It was inspired directly by years of working with mobile and experiencing the pains of crossplatform development such as Flutter and Expo. We can do better than these!
Rohansi 12 minutes ago [-]
> Although, I do not prefer Expo due to it's highly annoying build system and dependency hell
Highly agree with this. I'm almost done moving an app off it into React (web, not native) because the SDK upgrades kept including unlisted breaking changes to the point I can't upgrade anymore. Biggest culprit was Reanimated.
pjmlp 2 hours ago [-]
Google has two horses in this race, because Android team doesn't acknowledge Flutter and rather go with KMM and Compose, alongside JetBrains.
sulam 1 hours ago [-]
The internal divisions with this are really amusing. The big driver towards Flutter seems to be needing an iOS app, but Google really underinvests in those (YT being the exception, but it might as well be a different company).
> Dart is a really _ugly_ language with lots of tiny annoyances. Its as if someone took worst parts of Java and Javascript and turned them into a language. Terrible to write, terrible to read, terrible to use.
While I’m a bit ambivalent towards Flutter, I totally disagree with you on Dart. To me it’s a better version of Java/Typescript with a very mature cross-platform and JIT/AOT compiler. Admittedly there are some things I wish they would take from TS (like discriminated unions), and I haven’t tried “modern” Java either so maybe that’s improved, but even so, I rarely feel like Dart is getting in the way.
satvikpendem 2 hours ago [-]
They probably just haven't used the latest Dart versions which fixed a lot of the "ugliness" (which I'd call pragmatism but regardless) like primary constructors where a class can just be a single line now.
And I mean, their entire comment is a way to shill their app so I wouldn't take much stock in what they're saying.
brabel 2 hours ago [-]
Yeah I have no idea how someone who has used all these languages can come up with a conclusion like Dart is “uglier”. I really want to know what exactly they think is ugly about it!
anthropodie 1 hours ago [-]
They have written their own UI framework. Probably the reason they are biased against other frameworks
0rzech 2 hours ago [-]
Completely opposite experience for me.
I love working with Dart (which IMO is _not_ "worst parts of Java and Javascript (...) turned (...) into a language", "Terrible to write, terrible to read, terrible to use" - quite the opposite, actually) and its toolchain, including Flutter.
I find the architecture simple to follow, no need for "either print apps as fast as possible or to emulate some Clean Code like behavior", though I do think some people use overcomplicated state management solutions. But nobody forces anybody to do that.
My experience with Web has been fine so far and I've seen fully cross platform Flutter apps working absolutely fine on mobile, desktop and web.
This is not to gaslight your experience, YMMV after all.
And React Native, with its dependency hell, project rot, npm ecosystem under the hood, and transpilation with lax runtime leaking into TS, is a total no-go for me. Though I base this opinion partially on my experience with NodeJS, and partially on that of my friends who use RN.
Btw. Does your platform support bundling UI in addition to streaming it from the server? How large is the bundled runtime?
I’ve been keeping an eye on hypen.space and hope it succeeds. What is the level of maturity now and are there any multiplatform app examples that are not trivial?
AbuAssar 3 hours ago [-]
hypen looks very similar to SlintUI, isn't it?
4 hours ago [-]
Degorath 5 hours ago [-]
While all of the points you brought up are valid, I've hated every react native app I've ever had to work on.
Not because of react native itself, but because they usually take random react developers to work on these apps and the structure they create is absolutely horrible to work with (compared to, for example, native apps).
What was your experience on that aspect with Flutter?
meerita 5 hours ago [-]
I agree. RN has historically attracted a lot of web developers who treat mobile like a React website, and the result can be terrible. But I've seen exactly the same architectural problem in Flutter: huge widgets, mixed responsibilities, state everywhere, and very little separation of concerns. The framework doesn't protect you from bad engineering.
Degorath 3 hours ago [-]
Ah, that's a shame to hear. I would only like to add that at least for Android apps that I've been "hanging around" (my team never really worked on them), the teaching materials that are provided have generally made them a lot more pleasant compared to the RN stuff.
puelocesar 4 hours ago [-]
I was forced to migrate from pure native development to React Native and Redux is one of the stupidest things I ever witnessed. Or at least the way the previous devs setup that thing, because it’s so easy to make costly mistakes with it.
I lost so many days of my life profiling and debugging to figure out why hundreds of components were re-rendering when a tiny thing changed somewhere completely unrelated
user43928 3 hours ago [-]
Redux is great and it solves exactly that problem.
You create a selector. You use the selector in a React component.
The component re-renders when the selector outputs a different value, with the usual reference equality caveat.
Does it get any simpler than that?
However, yes, I have seen most developers use Redux incompetently.
They would use actions like "setOrder" instead of "itemAdded", defeating the purpose of a state machine from the start.
satvikpendem 2 hours ago [-]
They might have been using Redux before it did a major API change in the form of slices.
user43928 1 hours ago [-]
That would be about 7 years ago, when Redux Toolkit released in 2019.
tcfhgj 3 hours ago [-]
> figure out why hundreds of components were re-rendering when a tiny thing changed somewhere completely unrelated
Could you explain how this comes from React Native and/or redux?
I have used Angular with redux (ngrx) and redux made it quite obvious what changed what and why
thelollies 5 hours ago [-]
Funny to see speed in there, my experience is the opposite.
Im a very happy Flutter dev and it's always been odd to see so much negative sentiment around it when there are public discussions.
meerita 5 hours ago [-]
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palata 5 hours ago [-]
Out of curiosity, do you have any experience with Kotlin Multiplatform and Compose Multiplatform? I would like to know how that compares.
satvikpendem 2 hours ago [-]
I have. It's still immature compared to Flutter and doesn't necessarily run native compiled code depending on platform, it can still be tied to the JVM. Not to mention how amazing pub is compared to Gradle.
meerita 5 hours ago [-]
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sevenzero 5 hours ago [-]
>real native components
Since when does React Native use real native components? Last time I've checked it wasn't capable of doing ANYTHING with my phones NFC scanner or native camera...
With flutter I can just build a Kotlin component and integrate it easily into my app.
Also Flutters performance is extremely good, I dont know what you are on about. Our app is used on extremely old phones and has great performance. (I am not even a professional android/flutter dev, so I didnt optimize for performance).
meerita 5 hours ago [-]
You're mixing UI components with platform APIs. React Native does use native platform-backed views. NFC and camera access are separate concerns. If an API isn't exposed, you can write the native Swift/Kotlin module and bridge it, just like you would integrate native code into Flutter. Camera support also already exists in Expo.
sevenzero 4 hours ago [-]
I see, thanks for clarifying!
oDot 4 hours ago [-]
Does anyone know if the original promise of their simple layout model proved itself?
IIRC, the Flutter team mentioned how using just width/height constraints is enough to represent all relevant layouts. This sounds very nice, being so much simpler than Flexbox and miles ahead of CSS Grid ergonomics.
Did it live up to the promise or did they expand the model with Flex/Grid/etc?
faangguyindia 1 hours ago [-]
It's much easier to fix flutter layout issues than CSS on web in my experience.
phoghed 2 hours ago [-]
The web almost got constraint based layout. Well maybe almost is too strong, but it was a candidate. CCSS.
We got tables and floats instead.
gman83 4 hours ago [-]
The premise is a bit off. Flutter was never just width/height: the model is min/max box constraints. The core rule is: constraints go down, sizes come up, parent sets position.
Row and Column are just layout algorithms built on that same model, not separate engines added later. GridView uses the sliver system internally, but still doesn't require anything like CSS Grid's general layout model. The render API is open enough for custom layouts too, so packages like https://pub.dev/packages/boxy build directly on it
faangguyindia 1 hours ago [-]
I vouch for Flutter over React Native; we built https://macrocodex.app/ with 16,000+ users already!
And it's completely free no ads, no subscriptions, or donations, for the public benefit of improving health and fitness.
It's a guaranteed weight loss or gain app; results within 2-5 weeks! Don't believe? well just read reviews. We do not have Revenue, so no money to spend on marketing.
OK so that's brief description of what we built now flutter part:
The Flutter development experience is very smooth; you rarely run into any issues, just be careful not to block the UI isolate. Sometimes bad structuring issues or ui bugs may end up blocking your UI.
My experience is in Backend (java, rust, c++, go, ruby, python etc..) and this is the first time i built a mobile app. And same is true for other guys on the team.
Some limitations are from the underlying platform and not Flutter. Initially, I thought the lack of OTA was a dealbreaker (as App Store / Play Store approvals are a slow loop) and Expo might be better, but the lack of OTA made me structure the app differently and it turned out it's not as big of a deal actually.
We also managed to have a PWA app (for nearly free) by using Flutter web, so it also runs on devices which do not support the Play Store or App Store, giving us max coverage across the board.
We tested react native but found it slow (your code runs in Hermes VM so you need to write native code to offload) and dev tools aren't as good as flutters imho.
Dart AOT, which is what runs on iOS/Android, is much faster by default, so you'll hardly ever feel any need to write native code. And when you do need to write native code, we use some for WorkManager and HealthConnect it's very easy! Just be careful with R8; you might have to set rules (though most plugins ship with rules these days) but if you are writing native code in java/kotlin you may have to do this on your own, or it can sometimes break things!
I am glad I picked Flutter over React Native! I had my doubts, but I am glad I looked at their "architecture" rather than the hype of the subreddits.
ramijames 50 minutes ago [-]
I'll second this. I avoided React Native because I absolutely loathe using React in general (much prefer Vue/Nuxt or Svelte/SvelteKit). Flutter has been an absolute pleasure to build the mobile version of https://miserablyunemployed.com with. It's all really straightforward and I haven't experienced any real gotchas yet.
alternatex 51 minutes ago [-]
As someone coming from MacroFactor, estimating macros on food is the hardest part of dieting. So your app is great but it tackles the part of dieting that people aren't stuggling with and doesn't address the part that they do struggle with.
Most dieting apps are pushing for the AI photo and barcode scanning to make estimating easier and though far from perfect, it makes the whole experience at least somewhat doable.
faangguyindia 40 minutes ago [-]
>As someone coming from MacroFactor,
We've had many people who have unsubscribed from MacroFactor after using our MacroCodex.
Not just this, we've also built MacroFactor Workout's rival Symbiote Workout app which is also completely free! it's now in Beta and under rapid developement.
For calorie tracking, you've established apps like Cronometer and MyFitnessPal or they can use our completely free AI calorie tracker CalorieCodex! which does what you want! barcode scan / photo to calorie and macro output etc...
>estimating macros on food is the hardest part of dieting. So your app is great but it tackles the part of dieting that people aren't stuggling with and doesn't address the part that they do struggle with.
I believe MacroCodex actually targets the part most people are likely to struggle with and this is why it is able to provide guaranteed results!
This app is not a calorie tracker, though it can pull calorie totals and weight from other apps using Health Connect on Android.
>Most dieting apps are pushing for the AI photo and barcode scanning to make estimating easier and though far from perfect, it makes the whole experience at least somewhat doable.
We also have an AI calorie tracker; it's CalorieCodex. It's in BETA and can do Barcode/Photo using BYOK AI.
phoghed 55 minutes ago [-]
I wanted to love flutter. It’s just so hard to commit to anything like this Google makes without a full expectation of getting rug pulled.
faangguyindia 10 minutes ago [-]
I think they are planning to offload it to an open-source foundation! I remember having received a questionnaire along those lines!
doodlesdev 11 hours ago [-]
While I've used Flutter since Alpha, I've been away for a few years. A few things have shocked me in these release notes: how come Impeller still wasn't the default engine for all platforms? Also, why are they migrating to WASM if one of the core features of Dart is compiling to JavaScript? Finally, how come multi window support only get viable now, after four years having desktop support?
Honestly, Flutter is an extremely enjoyable development experience I would recommend anyone I care for to stay away from. The fact it's developed by Google doesn't help: it's a matter of time before they kill it like they did with so many UI libraries and frameworks already, specially with JetBrains developing Compose Multiplatform and the Android team going all-in in the Compose strategy.
nmfisher 5 hours ago [-]
> how come Impeller still wasn't the default engine for all platforms
Because Impeller has had quite a bumpy ride. Even as recently as June I reported a bug/regression with basic stuff (lines with partial transparency on desktop). All my Android apps are still built with --no-enable-impeller because I've had many instances where the app just shows a blank screen due to driver conflicts.
It may be getting close to stable now, but it wasn't a smooth transition at all.
maxloh 10 hours ago [-]
Flutter operates more like a 2D game engine. It renders its own views, which involves a lot of arithmetic operations, making WASM a more efficient option than JS.
WA 6 hours ago [-]
WASM or JS doesn’t matter. The reason is Canvas instead of DOM. Flutter apps render to the canvas element, because this is the only option for the 2D game engine you mentioned.
skybrian 11 hours ago [-]
I suppose AI would help for porting your app if you need to? It's not like the old days.
palata 5 hours ago [-]
Unless it is a trivial app, it would still require quite some effort to port (and test), which has a cost. What do you gain by using Flutter that compensates for that risk?
satvikpendem 2 hours ago [-]
Working on all devices with minimal effort. That's what I use it for anyway, anything else like a sound null safe language with Dart are just a bonus.
ls-a 10 hours ago [-]
This blogpost could've been an mcp doc. Who needs to know about this stuff these days? AI will never pick flutter for a project anyway
gman83 6 hours ago [-]
We've been hearing that Flutter is going to be killed any day now for almost a decade. And yet here we are, it's a stable platform that's quietly chugging along with massive 3rd party buy in. Honestly, Google could abandon it at this point and it would have enough momentum to keep going just fine. Where is Compose Multiplatform? Does anyone actually use that, is it even stable yet?
0rzech 1 hours ago [-]
The fact is, more and more companies are actually picking Flutter. :) Sony praises Flutter on embedded. LG has added extension to allow Flutter apps on its WebOS. Toyota is developing a Flutter game engine, which is already used in some of its cars.
satvikpendem 2 hours ago [-]
Some do use CMP but yes it's quite immature compared to Flutter and they'll spend a lot of time fixing the same bugs with rendering that Flutter fixed a while ago. We'll see how it goes though, if CMP becomes the blessed route for Android cross platform development it'll attract more people and attention.
merrvk 1 hours ago [-]
Need to let this project die and invest the manpower + experience into something useful.
hactually 35 minutes ago [-]
The android ecosystem is pretty useful...
TheChaplain 6 hours ago [-]
Are Flutter and React Native still viable choices today?
I get the impression that more are going for native mobile, KMP or PWA.
WA 6 hours ago [-]
Flutter: if you want a pixel perfect version of your app that looks similar on Android and iOS. Some quite popular apps use it and make a shit ton of money, for example Headspace. More here: https://flutterhunt.com/
React Native: totally viable, because core business logic is the same. If you want native UI elements and all the iOS Liquid Glass stuff, but don’t want to have to completely separate code based, React Native is a viable option if you don’t mind installing lots of third party packages for functionality you get out of the box in Flutter or true native apps.
Native mobile: I have one smaller app with quite a custom calendar view, written with Claude Code natively for Android and iOS. Coding agents help and you get maximum control. Mentally, it’s a bit cumbersome to direct you agent to do everything twice. While one platform can serve as a reference implementation for the other, it’s kinda annoying mentally "to do the same feature all over again and test and direct the agent". But it’s doable.
KMP: No experience, I just hate most things around Android.
PWA: That ship has sailed. Nobody knows about PWAs, most PWAs are bad. It’s a bummer really.
Capacitor: make an SPA (offline-first preferably), and use native code plugins via Capacitor. Still quite feasible, comparable to Flutter in the sense that you need to build a custom UI or use a fake version of Liquid Glass and Material. I use Ionic for that, but it’s a bit dated (still on Material v2). Heavily depends on your skills as a web dev to get good UX.
sgt 6 hours ago [-]
Native was always the best. It was just time consuming, requiring a bigger team. Now with AI helping out, it's probably the best option by far. I still like Flutter a lot though because you can get stuff done fairly quickly and even apply Material design to the iOS apps or vice versa if you want to (if it's a business app where the design doesn't matter too much). Or if you e.g. target win32
gman83 4 hours ago [-]
Even with AI, maintaining feature parity between Android, iOS, Windows, Linux, and Mac is extremely complex. Flutter makes it so much easier. If I were doing native, I'd probably have to drop all desktop platforms.
victorbjorklund 5 hours ago [-]
In most cases yes but if you don’t want native elements and you want your app to look exactly the same on android as on iOS then flutter is a better choice. Assuming you don’t have any performance limitiations.
tcfhgj 3 hours ago [-]
Why would you want apps on different os look exactly the same?
GeneralMaximus 2 hours ago [-]
Why would you not?
I use Ableton, Figma, and Emacs regularly. I have a decade (or more) of muscle memory around these apps. If they suddenly decided to adopt the look, feel, and conventions of their underlying host platform, I’d be very upset.
If I’m using Emacs, I don’t want to use Cmd+S to save my files on macOS and Ctrl+S on Windows. I’ve already memorized C-x C-s. I don’t want Ableton to adopt whatever new design language Apple or Microsoft is chasing this week. I want to open the app and find the UI controls looking and behaving exactly the same as they’ve looked and behaved since I started using it in 2014. I want to write code, make music, do design. I don’t want to be frustrated because the button for enabling the metronome is 15px to the left on Windows vs. macOS.
Apps that look and feel native only make sense in two cases:
1. The app is tied to the platform. E.g. Logic Pro. It can integrate deeply into macOS and use the native widget set because it will never run on any other platform. Same for Bear, Things, Pixelmator, Omni Group apps, etc.
2. The app is a replaceable, throw-away utility. I call these “fungible apps”. For example, it doesn’t really matter which Mastodon or Bluesky client you use. There are hundreds of them, and they’re not complex enough that the loss of familiarity or muscle memory matters very much. You can use one client on Windows, a different one on macOS, and a third one on Linux, and it’ll be fine. They can all be native to their platforms, or not. The interaction model is simple enough that you can afford to have a different one on every platform.
For apps that really matter—the apps I use to put food on the table—I absolutely want them to look and feel exactly the same on every platform. The app is the OS, the actual OS is just a hardware abstraction layer.
Can Flutter be used to build apps like Figma or Ableton or Emacs? I actually don’t think so. It’s a poor toolkit for building anything that must last for more than 3-5 years. If you care about longevity, there are basically only three options in 2026: Qt, Electron, or roll your own like Zed/Sublime.
sgt 3 hours ago [-]
I don't think you'd want to in most cases, but adapting to different platforms takes energy and thought. For business CRUD apps you may just want to ignore that and get something out that works well.
pjmlp 2 hours ago [-]
No one cares about PWAs, because mobile Web by itself is good enough without having to deal with PWAs boilerplate.
mad_tortoise 4 hours ago [-]
I've built apps with millions of users using flutter. Quicker, faster and easier for building cross-platform apps if you know what you are doing.
This is coming from a native framework evangelist for many years, and then just tried flutter early days (which was far more difficult than how easy it is today). Now I write almost all my projects in flutter/dart where I can, especially with AI the speed from idea to production is insane.
keyle 6 hours ago [-]
We use flutter at work. When you need to target various platforms for the same code base it's extremely competent.
wwdrew 6 hours ago [-]
I’ve been a React Native developer for 8 years, I’ve written many apps with it professionally and personally. Until recently, I would have recommended it wholeheartedly.
This weekend I had an idea I set out to experiment with: if I have an existing React Native app, how much effort would it take an LLM to rewrite it into genuinely native apps. My idea being I no longer need to write cross-platform code and pay the intermediary framework costs, I’d get direct access to the underlying platform. Instead, I could just spec the features I need in the app and the LLM can build it.
It took me a year to build the original app to production quality by hand. My “twins”, as they’ve become known, were at 80% completion in three days of on-off work.
I’m pretty much convinced my experiment was a success. Which sorta terrifies me that I’ve specialised in a technology that can be, for all intents and purposes, be entirely erased.
The only caveat I can find is it is still a great technology for doing cross-platform mobile and web. Using something like Tamagui (as rough as that can be sometimes) allows genuine code sharing across all platforms.
Sucks most that I’m now actively looking for a new React Native role.
jcollins 4 hours ago [-]
I really believe this is the way forward, native platform UI built by AI.
I'm trying it now with an app and so far it's working really well. I build what I can cross platform, the non-ui stuff, then have AI build the UI for each platform.
It even implemented native low-level graphics on each platform: metal, vulkan, and d3d12. It builds SwiftUI on Apple platforms, WinUI3 on Windows, GTK4 on Linux, Compose on Android. The cross platform stuff is Zig with a C ABI.
And yeah, it's a bit terrifying how fast you can iterate. I've built for all these platforms in about a month. It would have taken at least a year, maybe more before. I haven't even optimized the process by having AI agents follow my lead automatically, so as I finish features on the primary platform they could start building the others by watching. Requires some setup I haven't tackled yet (VMs for all platforms with agents waiting).
puelocesar 4 hours ago [-]
Be careful, I’ve been using AI to translate my Swift code to Kotlin and sometimes it makes some mistakes that are invisible to you, because the languages are so similar, but it will bite you in the ass eventually, because there are subtle changes between the platforms
brabel 2 hours ago [-]
I am sure you are right but if you tell the LLM to be careful with those it should easily avoid those mistakes. But yeah first you need to know what to look for.
jcollins 4 hours ago [-]
Do you have an example? I don't doubt it, I just want to make sure I watch out for it.
One downside for sure is lack of deep knowledge on all these platforms can make it difficult to see issues.
foresterre 5 hours ago [-]
Not saying that LLM development isn't fast, but doing a re-implementation of something you know in-and-out is almost always going to be faster, as you skip the probably most time intensive step of product research and requirement engineering.
wwdrew 5 hours ago [-]
Absolutely, but that doesn’t discount that it’s now feasible to spec a feature once and have it built for me on both apps. I’m doing the same process on a new project I’m working on and it’s built both apps simultaneously as I’d hoped.
rapsey 5 hours ago [-]
Every time we tried it, it resulted in a worse experience than we knew could be done using native stacks. It is like using sand as a foundation for your house. Random version updates break random things. As soon as you need something a bit advanced on the platform, you are stuck with some barely supported library. Easy to start, hard to maintain and hard to ship a solid product.
Humphrey 12 hours ago [-]
Oh finally multi-window support - I might finally be able to flutter for a simple desktop app side project I've been wanting to build.
feverzsj 8 hours ago [-]
Tested lots of flutter desktop apps on Github last year. All have sluggish animation. FPS rarely reached 60.
britannio 3 hours ago [-]
Debug mode?
thelollies 5 hours ago [-]
I do more mobile/web Flutter dev so haven't got experience here but I'm surprised to hear that. Can you name some examples?
Aldo_MX 13 hours ago [-]
Decoupling material and cupertino makes a lot of sense.
gman83 13 hours ago [-]
Yes, hopefully now that this decoupling is complete, they'll actually start being updated again. The progress was a bit stalled while this process was ongoing.
junaid1460 3 hours ago [-]
I just moved out last month, it's just pain after sometime now, it's okay and good for mobile cross, when it comes to desktop, I'd have to struggle to support linux with quick hangs
synergy20 12 hours ago [-]
great for mobile apps, fine for desktops, basically unusable for browsers unless you do wasm, if web can be revamped/improved it can be the best option for cross platform GUI
JimDabell 5 hours ago [-]
> basically unusable for browsers unless you do wasm
Relying on WASM means that nobody on Apple platforms who has Lockdown Mode enabled for better security will be able to use it.
sevenzero 5 hours ago [-]
I see that as a win
eklavya 10 hours ago [-]
You are in luck then, use jaspr.
tonyhart7 11 hours ago [-]
no one and absolutely no one pick flutter because they want do traditional web in the first place
its a cross platform framework that you can share component between mobile and other platform and always has been
999900000999 11 hours ago [-]
I’ve used flutter for a couple of toy web apps. One is just a personal tool , another is a small party game.
Now I might vibe code such things using React, but 5 , 6 years ago Flutter got me what I wanted fast.
Firebase integration is absurdly easy. You can make a crud app in about 30 minutes
tonyhart7 6 hours ago [-]
Yes but its best work with SPA or WASM type of app like games for example
BiteCode_dev 51 minutes ago [-]
Very happy that it's still maintain, because that's the only real framework that allow an easy dev for a decently fast app with one code base that works on linux, windows, mac, ios and android at once.
It's super nice.
kumarvvr 13 hours ago [-]
The one thing I hate about flutter is the ui code having an ungodly amount of nested brackets.
gman83 4 hours ago [-]
I treat nesting as a feature: if the nesting starts getting deep, that's the code indicating to extract a child widget. It pushes me toward better composition and smaller, reusable components instead of giant monolithic views.
MrDresden 5 hours ago [-]
While you aren't wrong, in my experience when the amount of nesting starts giving me bad vibes it usually indicates that something can be refactored out as a standalone widget.
Still, Flutter now feels ancient to use compared to something like Compose, in that regard.
skeledrew 11 hours ago [-]
For some reason I prefer those to curlies.
superze 12 hours ago [-]
Loc goes brrrrrrr. The tokenmaxxing of the 20s
cocoa19 10 hours ago [-]
Didn't realize it until now, but you're right.
LOC is dead, long live token usage.
eddythompson80 13 hours ago [-]
You clearly need more Lispmaxxing
12 hours ago [-]
eviks 4 hours ago [-]
> Linux and Windows now support popup windows, allowing you to build native context menus and utility palettes.
How does such a basic feature only get added so late?
AbuAssar 3 hours ago [-]
flutter started as a mobile framework, and mobiles didn't support multi windows back then
eviks 3 hours ago [-]
This doesn't help, desktop support was added 5 years ago, so that's longer than the age of flutter before that
ouz-a 3 hours ago [-]
Flutter is good on its own but dev tooling and long compile times kills all the enjoyment.
brabel 2 hours ago [-]
With full hot reload support I am curious how compile times can be an issue.
sunsetSamurai 11 hours ago [-]
how's Dart for back end development? is anybody using it to build APIs? the syntax doesn't look too bad
0rzech 3 hours ago [-]
While the server side is still growing and obviously not as huge as Java etc., Dart definitely is being used on the backend. For instance, https://pub.dev/ itself is written in Dart: https://github.com/dart-lang/pub-dev . :)
The language, like any other, does have some weaker parts, but in general is _very_ nice to write in - thanks to both the language itself and the toolchain built around it.
The apps compile to native binaries for production and are run in Dart VM during development. The SDK is multi purpose. You can write "scripts", you can write CLI apps, servers and with Flutter - the rest of them.
brabel 2 hours ago [-]
For production you may consider using dart VM also since it benefits from AOT and can actually be faster than a binary after it gets hot, similar to Java.
0rzech 1 hours ago [-]
Correct. At the cost of using more RAM, of course.
flexagoon 6 hours ago [-]
I have user Dart for small personal projects and it's a great language. Somewhat similar to Kotlin, but IMO a bit nicer. Unfortunately the ecosystem is not as developed outside of Flutter as with more popular languages, but it very much exists and pretty nice to use.
wstrange 10 hours ago [-]
Try out serverpod. Not affiliated with them- it's just a super nice integrated Dart backend:
I've been using Dart and Flutter for years, but I've never ever met anyone who's seriously using Dart for backend. That would be a very niche thing and not popular with teams.
kebsup 2 hours ago [-]
If anyone is interested to see the WASM + canvas renderer performance compared to Android/iOS builds, I've build my app for the web.
To an untrained eye who does not care about dropping a few frames, the web version is almost indistinguishable from the "native" build. Especially if you add it to homescreen from safari to hide the navigation bar.
AbuAssar 3 hours ago [-]
the "Text and selection" demo caught my attention, why flutter render the shortcuts bar itself and not delegate this to the underlaying os?
jimbob45 13 hours ago [-]
Of all the myriad projects from Google, how is Flutter/Dart the one that survived the axe? I’m not saying I hate them - I think they’re both really neat - I just don’t understand why Google keeps these limping along with weak support and no clear vision within their broader web ecosystem.
vmg12 13 hours ago [-]
Easy, there are a few google teams that use flutter and the cost savings from not having to have dedicated ios and android teams is very easy to point at to justify the project's existence.
I think Dart and Flutter are very overlooked. The language has completely changed since its release, its statically typed, has null safety, enums, and pattern matching, and is very simple and easy to read. It has fast compilation and a ui framework with hot reload. It's as fast as Js on v8 while using less memory and has the overlooked feature of having very fast, almost 0 overhead, ffi.
I think the importance of good ffi is underrated for these ui languages. For reference, everyone that's using electron has to run two node processes doing ipc over a websocket connection. That's going to waste an absurd number of cpu cycles and memory when you are passing messages around when your app is basically a ui for a cli.
cageface 13 hours ago [-]
I’ve had good experiences with Flutter too. It’s actually much easier to build a performant macOS app with flutter than with SwiftUI.
wiseowise 10 hours ago [-]
> It’s actually much easier to build a performant macOS app with flutter than with SwiftUI.
Got any case studies?
cageface 7 hours ago [-]
Just my own apps. Getting good performance out of SwiftUI on Mac is quite difficult. Loads of footguns.
mathverse 6 hours ago [-]
And yet I dont see any Flutter macos apps at all.
Larrikin 12 hours ago [-]
But they also fund JetBrains, Jetpack Compose, and KMP. It feels like the company threw their support behind Kotlin a long while ago on mobile, but internal struggles keep the others limping along. Compose UI tooling no longer requires viewing on device.
wiseowise 10 hours ago [-]
Only because it was cheaper to migrate Android to Kotlin instead of Dart. JetBrains needs Google more than Google needs JetBrains.
brabel 2 hours ago [-]
At the time Google went with Kotlin, Flutter was still very new and a much bigger step away from Java given Kotlin already back then was seamlessly integrated with Java and compiled to JVM bytecode.
pjmlp 8 hours ago [-]
There are several clues that the reasons were more political than monetary, including some former team members like Jake Warton remarks on Dart.
Note that Dart or Flutter are nowhere to be found on Android developer documentation.
invalidname 12 hours ago [-]
You're thinking of Google as a single top down company. It isn't. Think of it as an anarchy of warlords where each pulls the strings and management doesn't really know what's going on.
Flutter made a lot of sense during the Oracle lawsuit when Google needed a way to show Oracle that it can pivot from Java. Now it no longer makes sense but the inertia is too deep.
My guess is that flutter is sold internally through the Huawei support as a leg within China.
veeti 6 hours ago [-]
Android used to be its own kingdom separate from rest of Google. And maybe still is.
12 hours ago [-]
formvoltron 13 hours ago [-]
Curious how you feel about KMP and Kotlin Compose.
vmg12 12 hours ago [-]
I like kotlin a lot but I didn't get to fully test KMP and Kotlin Compose. I chose flutter because I liked dart's wasm story better than kotlins.
gumby271 13 hours ago [-]
How are they limping? Flutter has completely replaced it's rendering engine across all platforms and they're building out major window management support on desktop platforms.
At some point there's just not much exciting new stuff to add. Flutter is a nice stable platform, I'd highly recommend it.
kllrnohj 12 hours ago [-]
> Flutter has completely replaced it's rendering engine across all platforms
And that new rendering engine is also why apps like Immich are unable to show HDR photos. Apple & Google both pushed broad support for that a couple years ago, with things like Ultra HDR and subsequently ISO 21496-1.
Of course they need to prioritize where to spend resources, like any project, but Flutter also doesn't seem to be on any critical path for fancy headlining new features, either.
matchbok3 13 hours ago [-]
Right, but, nobody uses it. So what's the point for Google?
doodlesdev 11 hours ago [-]
I've made a huge critic towards Flutter in another comment of mine, but adoption isn't it: the biggest bank in Brazil, with 135 million clients, is a digital bank whose sole interface is their Flutter app. They are different regarding tech choices (they use Clojure on the backend too), but I think it's a huge testament of how far along Flutter adoption has come.
I really don't understand how/why people deny reality so hard when it comes to Flutter. Reminds me a bit of years ago when people were still scoffing at the idea of anyone actually adopting JavaScript to write web servers with while Node.js was very obviously eating up the market.
pjmlp 8 hours ago [-]
It eats the market indeed, and also presents business opportunities for folks like myself, jumping in writing C++ addons, or completely replacing it with Java, .NET, Go, Rust,....
gkhartman 12 hours ago [-]
Is that true though? I'm reading HN on an app built using Flutter. I had no idea until recently, so I would assume more apps could use it without my knowledge.
I understand it's limitations vs native apps, but there's quite a few cases where it really doesn't matter.
The biggest one for me is always the fear it will be abandoned. Pretty much goes for any cross platform app framework though.
vips7L 12 hours ago [-]
The creator of flutter was on here saying that 1/3 of all apps on the App Store use it. That seems to be a lot more than “nobody”.
owebmaster 11 hours ago [-]
The creator of flutter lied then. That's not true.
vips7L 9 hours ago [-]
How do you know? Why are we inclined to believe you over him?
satvikpendem 2 hours ago [-]
It's simple, it disagrees with their preconceived notions so obviously we're wrong and they're right.
Barrin92 10 hours ago [-]
>but, nobody uses it.
I used to work at ByteDance and they alone employed I think more than 800 Flutter Devs. Douyin uses Flutter (the Chinese version of TikTok), Grab and Ebay use it, Alibaba and Baidu did too. Toyota and Volkswagen I think both use Flutter. Nubank I think is also a flutter app and they alone have like one hundred million some users.
With the popularity in the Chinese ecosystem alone there's gotta be a billion plus people using flutter.
That’s awesome how has the experience been between shipping for both iOS and Android.
Gonna check out the app
monocasa 13 hours ago [-]
Google internally uses dart, and I remember hearing that adwords in particular was rewritten in dart at least for the frontend relatively recently.
So they're probably investing in it enough for basic maintenance, but don't really care about evolving the language.
skybrian 11 hours ago [-]
Sure, Adwords migrated from GWT to Dart. (And eventually I followed.) At one point, Dart moved from the Chrome division to the Adwords division. And Adwords alone can fund a team to do developer tools for them. Then, Flutter came a bit later.
It's been over a decade since then, though, and I'm out of touch now.
pjmlp 8 hours ago [-]
In fact AdWords is the reason Dart was still around when Flutter came to be.
spwa4 4 hours ago [-]
They still maintaining it's predecessor that the Google "core properties" ran on: Closure (not Clojure), the javascript compiler. It's an evolution of the hack that Gmail initially was built on.
gman83 13 hours ago [-]
I guess because they have buy-in from within Google? Google Pay, NotebookLM, Family Link, Google One, etc. are made with Flutter.
deepsun 13 hours ago [-]
Most Google's projects that users loved were axed for a reason, typically internal management wars for promotions. Like YouTube really wanted to kill belowed Google Music, so they did. Or Google Pay vs Google Wallet.
Killing Flutter would not promote a manager. For now, of course.
Scene_Cast2 12 hours ago [-]
In one of their dev surveys, they did float the idea of divesting Flutter.
13 hours ago [-]
jauntywundrkind 7 hours ago [-]
Flutter's not a web ecosystem project. It doesn't do HTML at all. Using canvas to pump pixels in people's faces does not the web make.
Scene_Cast2 12 hours ago [-]
Awesome. I'd love if Flutter could also finally get Impeller on Web (I'm tracking the GitHub issues, seems like there's progress at least).
I personally would like for it to pick up some ideas from Svelte.
skeledrew 11 hours ago [-]
Been waiting especially for multi-window so it can be picked up by Flet.
theanonymousone 11 hours ago [-]
Are you using Flet? If yes do you think it's mature enough and has a potential to stay long "in the game"?
skeledrew 11 hours ago [-]
I use Flet in a few projects. It's still somewhat young and the declarative move caused a few issues (for me, mainly because I wasn't familiar with the pattern), but generally I'd say it's stable, feature-complete and the maintainer seems to be in it for the long haul. Also it fills a critical gap that nothing else does, binding a decent UI framework and cross-platform capability to a language with an extremely large and diverse ecosystem; that's what I think will really make it endure.
theanonymousone 5 hours ago [-]
Thanks. And do you know what it has to do with Flutter these days actually? There is barely any mention of Flutter in the website etc :/
hirvi74 9 hours ago [-]
I've never used Kotlin, but I really enjoy Flutter. Not nearly as much as SwiftUI and the Lord's language, mind you.
Flutter can get you up and running quickly. If I want cross-plaform support, one codebase is hard to beat.
wiseowise 10 hours ago [-]
> We are actively working toward enabling WebAssembly (Wasm) by default for Flutter web applications, bringing native-like performance to the browser.
lol.
amazingamazing 11 hours ago [-]
I always find it strange that flutter isn’t built with golang or typescript. Why use a new language? When flutter came out both languages existed so curious about that.
The main reason i can think of is generics not existing initially
esprehn 1 hours ago [-]
There were a lot of factors that led to the dart decision. It's also important to note that Flutter is very old, we were designing it in 2014.
- we wanted hot reload
- it was supposed to feel familiar to web developers and reasonable to native developers
- iOS needed AOT compilation for speed since we couldn't use a JIT
- TypeScript had literally just reached 1.0
- Swift looked promising, but the Oracle lawsuit made the idea of using it tenuous
- Kotlin was not even 1.0 yet, that wouldn't happen for 2 more years
- Go made huge binaries. The language was also lacking features like generics and Go was unwilling to add them (remember this is 2014).
- v8 was not interested in AOT, but Dart was willing to dramatically invest in flutter
There were probably other reasons too I'm forgetting.
Dart was a really pragmatic choice to ship quickly. I have mixed feels about how the decision has aged over time, and wish we had things like Hermes and WASM back then, and a willingness to build a TypeScript compiler like other native frameworks (ex. Valdi)... But for the time I think the choice was reasonable.
billynomates 5 hours ago [-]
Dart shipped in 2011, four years before Flutter started.
On the technical side, Flutter needed AOT compilation to native ARM for release builds and a JIT for development (that's what makes stateful hot reload possible). Dart does both from one codebase. TypeScript means shipping a JS VM, which is precisely the overhead Flutter was designed to avoid. (In contrast to RN). Dart's other big win is GC tuned for allocating and throwing away tons of short-lived objects which is what happens when you hot reload over and over.
Go has no JIT, so no hot reload, and no generics until 2022, Flutter has a big widget library so that would not have been possible.
And of course the Dart team was inside Google, and had just lost its original mission when Chrome declined to ship the Dart VM, and was willing to change the language to suit Flutter.
bbkane 10 hours ago [-]
I'm not sure why you're being downvoted, it's a super reasonable question.
Iirc the reason is that the Dart team was willing to heavily modify the language and runtime to accommodate the needs of Flutter and the V8 team wasn't.
* Language and hiring: TypeScript has a much larger developer pool. Dart is a solid language, but finding experienced Flutter engineers is harder.
* Platform model: React Native maps much more naturally to native platform concepts. Flutter owns much more of the rendering stack, which is powerful, but also creates another abstraction layer between the app and the platform.
* Performance: Flutter can absolutely be fast, so I would not claim otherwise. My experience, however, is that RN has required less work to get interactions and animations that feel consistently native.
* Ecosystem: RN benefits from the broader React, TypeScript, JavaScript, and native ecosystems. Expo has also improved dramatically and now covers a large part of the usual mobile platform work.
* Platform-specific features: neither framework completely eliminates native code. Things like widgets, Live Activities, Dynamic Island, extensions, NFC, and other platform APIs eventually bring you back to Swift/Kotlin anyway.
* Migration to native: if the long-term destination is Swift and Kotlin, I find RN a better intermediate representation. Its component model and platform integration are closer to native concepts, which also makes the codebase easier for agents to translate incrementally into proper native applications.
That said, these are trade-offs, not claims that Flutter is bad. Flutter has improved a lot, and for teams that want a highly consistent cross-platform UI, its rendering model can be an advantage.
- Dart. It's richer than JS/TS with stronger type safety, and seems purpose-built for UI. Fewer Dart developers than JS, but I'd argue those JS developers cannot be immediately effective coding React Native (Expo) anyway.
- Emulated components vs. real native components. For multi-platform apps, this is actually desirable. These kinds of apps have their own design system.
- Speed. In my experience, it's negligible, but maybe because I keep using the latest version.
- Ecosystem. Flutter/Dart occasionally introduces "breaking" changes (such as migration to null safety, and recently deprecation of CocoaPods). Community very quick to update their plugins and adapt. Some abandoned plugins were immediately forked to keep being maintained.
- Migrating to native platforms, easier for agents to read an RN project. I'd argue it should be _easier_ to do that with Dart since the language is less "ambiguous" than JS.
However it's not perfect. My complaints:
- Not ideal for web apps with lots of FIRST-time visitors, due to initial download. There are some attempts to solve this, e.g. deferred loading, but I think inherently it's unsolvable since you need to download the whole world (a few MBs) to have the app running on your browser. That's why for this scenario I use SvelteKit. But if you already have a mobile app and want to get a web app "for free", this is a useful feature.
- WebView support is inconsistent across platforms (I'm looking at you, Windows and Linux).
- Text fields are quirky on Android TV.
another reason why the web should move from whole app bundling to content addressed CDNs for library code. you would only need to download one copy for each framework version not every site. and its easy to make it decentralized with IPFS if you want.
- Dart is a really _ugly_ language with lots of tiny annoyances. Its as if someone took worst parts of Java and Javascript and turned them into a language. Terrible to write, terrible to read, terrible to use.
- While there is no Skia anymore, the whole custom rendering of Flutter often caused more trouble than not, from the UI implementation itself all the way to specific low-end chipsets not being supported.
- Ecosystem propagates these insane architectures that don't make much sense and are made to either print apps as fast as possible or to emulate some Clean Code like behavior.
- Web still feels terrible to use, even after all these years.
Since I'm not happy with any of these, I've even taken upon writing a framework of my own that renders into native UI and works with any language (gonna shill it here https://hypen.space). It was inspired directly by years of working with mobile and experiencing the pains of crossplatform development such as Flutter and Expo. We can do better than these!
Highly agree with this. I'm almost done moving an app off it into React (web, not native) because the SDK upgrades kept including unlisted breaking changes to the point I can't upgrade anymore. Biggest culprit was Reanimated.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VX6nAvRWQg4&t=3418s
While I’m a bit ambivalent towards Flutter, I totally disagree with you on Dart. To me it’s a better version of Java/Typescript with a very mature cross-platform and JIT/AOT compiler. Admittedly there are some things I wish they would take from TS (like discriminated unions), and I haven’t tried “modern” Java either so maybe that’s improved, but even so, I rarely feel like Dart is getting in the way.
And I mean, their entire comment is a way to shill their app so I wouldn't take much stock in what they're saying.
I love working with Dart (which IMO is _not_ "worst parts of Java and Javascript (...) turned (...) into a language", "Terrible to write, terrible to read, terrible to use" - quite the opposite, actually) and its toolchain, including Flutter.
I find the architecture simple to follow, no need for "either print apps as fast as possible or to emulate some Clean Code like behavior", though I do think some people use overcomplicated state management solutions. But nobody forces anybody to do that.
My experience with Web has been fine so far and I've seen fully cross platform Flutter apps working absolutely fine on mobile, desktop and web.
This is not to gaslight your experience, YMMV after all.
And React Native, with its dependency hell, project rot, npm ecosystem under the hood, and transpilation with lax runtime leaking into TS, is a total no-go for me. Though I base this opinion partially on my experience with NodeJS, and partially on that of my friends who use RN.
Btw. Does your platform support bundling UI in addition to streaming it from the server? How large is the bundled runtime?
PS. Clicking on "see all supported platforms →" on your project's homepage gives 404 for https://docs.hypen.space/docs/adapters .
What was your experience on that aspect with Flutter?
I lost so many days of my life profiling and debugging to figure out why hundreds of components were re-rendering when a tiny thing changed somewhere completely unrelated
You create a selector. You use the selector in a React component.
The component re-renders when the selector outputs a different value, with the usual reference equality caveat.
Does it get any simpler than that?
However, yes, I have seen most developers use Redux incompetently.
They would use actions like "setOrder" instead of "itemAdded", defeating the purpose of a state machine from the start.
Could you explain how this comes from React Native and/or redux?
I have used Angular with redux (ngrx) and redux made it quite obvious what changed what and why
Im a very happy Flutter dev and it's always been odd to see so much negative sentiment around it when there are public discussions.
Since when does React Native use real native components? Last time I've checked it wasn't capable of doing ANYTHING with my phones NFC scanner or native camera...
With flutter I can just build a Kotlin component and integrate it easily into my app. Also Flutters performance is extremely good, I dont know what you are on about. Our app is used on extremely old phones and has great performance. (I am not even a professional android/flutter dev, so I didnt optimize for performance).
IIRC, the Flutter team mentioned how using just width/height constraints is enough to represent all relevant layouts. This sounds very nice, being so much simpler than Flexbox and miles ahead of CSS Grid ergonomics.
Did it live up to the promise or did they expand the model with Flex/Grid/etc?
We got tables and floats instead.
Row and Column are just layout algorithms built on that same model, not separate engines added later. GridView uses the sliver system internally, but still doesn't require anything like CSS Grid's general layout model. The render API is open enough for custom layouts too, so packages like https://pub.dev/packages/boxy build directly on it
And it's completely free no ads, no subscriptions, or donations, for the public benefit of improving health and fitness.
It's a guaranteed weight loss or gain app; results within 2-5 weeks! Don't believe? well just read reviews. We do not have Revenue, so no money to spend on marketing.
OK so that's brief description of what we built now flutter part:
The Flutter development experience is very smooth; you rarely run into any issues, just be careful not to block the UI isolate. Sometimes bad structuring issues or ui bugs may end up blocking your UI.
My experience is in Backend (java, rust, c++, go, ruby, python etc..) and this is the first time i built a mobile app. And same is true for other guys on the team.
Some limitations are from the underlying platform and not Flutter. Initially, I thought the lack of OTA was a dealbreaker (as App Store / Play Store approvals are a slow loop) and Expo might be better, but the lack of OTA made me structure the app differently and it turned out it's not as big of a deal actually.
We also managed to have a PWA app (for nearly free) by using Flutter web, so it also runs on devices which do not support the Play Store or App Store, giving us max coverage across the board.
We tested react native but found it slow (your code runs in Hermes VM so you need to write native code to offload) and dev tools aren't as good as flutters imho. Dart AOT, which is what runs on iOS/Android, is much faster by default, so you'll hardly ever feel any need to write native code. And when you do need to write native code, we use some for WorkManager and HealthConnect it's very easy! Just be careful with R8; you might have to set rules (though most plugins ship with rules these days) but if you are writing native code in java/kotlin you may have to do this on your own, or it can sometimes break things!
I am glad I picked Flutter over React Native! I had my doubts, but I am glad I looked at their "architecture" rather than the hype of the subreddits.
Most dieting apps are pushing for the AI photo and barcode scanning to make estimating easier and though far from perfect, it makes the whole experience at least somewhat doable.
We've had many people who have unsubscribed from MacroFactor after using our MacroCodex.
Not just this, we've also built MacroFactor Workout's rival Symbiote Workout app which is also completely free! it's now in Beta and under rapid developement.
For calorie tracking, you've established apps like Cronometer and MyFitnessPal or they can use our completely free AI calorie tracker CalorieCodex! which does what you want! barcode scan / photo to calorie and macro output etc...
>estimating macros on food is the hardest part of dieting. So your app is great but it tackles the part of dieting that people aren't stuggling with and doesn't address the part that they do struggle with.
I believe MacroCodex actually targets the part most people are likely to struggle with and this is why it is able to provide guaranteed results!
This app is not a calorie tracker, though it can pull calorie totals and weight from other apps using Health Connect on Android.
To understand the problem we are solving, you'll need to read this: https://macrocodex.app/knowledge/rethink/adaptive-tdee/
We've had to design this algorithm to figure out real maintenance calories: https://macrocodex.app/knowledge/macrocodex/smart-calorie-bu...
>Most dieting apps are pushing for the AI photo and barcode scanning to make estimating easier and though far from perfect, it makes the whole experience at least somewhat doable.
We also have an AI calorie tracker; it's CalorieCodex. It's in BETA and can do Barcode/Photo using BYOK AI.
Honestly, Flutter is an extremely enjoyable development experience I would recommend anyone I care for to stay away from. The fact it's developed by Google doesn't help: it's a matter of time before they kill it like they did with so many UI libraries and frameworks already, specially with JetBrains developing Compose Multiplatform and the Android team going all-in in the Compose strategy.
Because Impeller has had quite a bumpy ride. Even as recently as June I reported a bug/regression with basic stuff (lines with partial transparency on desktop). All my Android apps are still built with --no-enable-impeller because I've had many instances where the app just shows a blank screen due to driver conflicts.
It may be getting close to stable now, but it wasn't a smooth transition at all.
I get the impression that more are going for native mobile, KMP or PWA.
React Native: totally viable, because core business logic is the same. If you want native UI elements and all the iOS Liquid Glass stuff, but don’t want to have to completely separate code based, React Native is a viable option if you don’t mind installing lots of third party packages for functionality you get out of the box in Flutter or true native apps.
Native mobile: I have one smaller app with quite a custom calendar view, written with Claude Code natively for Android and iOS. Coding agents help and you get maximum control. Mentally, it’s a bit cumbersome to direct you agent to do everything twice. While one platform can serve as a reference implementation for the other, it’s kinda annoying mentally "to do the same feature all over again and test and direct the agent". But it’s doable.
KMP: No experience, I just hate most things around Android.
PWA: That ship has sailed. Nobody knows about PWAs, most PWAs are bad. It’s a bummer really.
Capacitor: make an SPA (offline-first preferably), and use native code plugins via Capacitor. Still quite feasible, comparable to Flutter in the sense that you need to build a custom UI or use a fake version of Liquid Glass and Material. I use Ionic for that, but it’s a bit dated (still on Material v2). Heavily depends on your skills as a web dev to get good UX.
I use Ableton, Figma, and Emacs regularly. I have a decade (or more) of muscle memory around these apps. If they suddenly decided to adopt the look, feel, and conventions of their underlying host platform, I’d be very upset.
If I’m using Emacs, I don’t want to use Cmd+S to save my files on macOS and Ctrl+S on Windows. I’ve already memorized C-x C-s. I don’t want Ableton to adopt whatever new design language Apple or Microsoft is chasing this week. I want to open the app and find the UI controls looking and behaving exactly the same as they’ve looked and behaved since I started using it in 2014. I want to write code, make music, do design. I don’t want to be frustrated because the button for enabling the metronome is 15px to the left on Windows vs. macOS.
Apps that look and feel native only make sense in two cases:
1. The app is tied to the platform. E.g. Logic Pro. It can integrate deeply into macOS and use the native widget set because it will never run on any other platform. Same for Bear, Things, Pixelmator, Omni Group apps, etc.
2. The app is a replaceable, throw-away utility. I call these “fungible apps”. For example, it doesn’t really matter which Mastodon or Bluesky client you use. There are hundreds of them, and they’re not complex enough that the loss of familiarity or muscle memory matters very much. You can use one client on Windows, a different one on macOS, and a third one on Linux, and it’ll be fine. They can all be native to their platforms, or not. The interaction model is simple enough that you can afford to have a different one on every platform.
For apps that really matter—the apps I use to put food on the table—I absolutely want them to look and feel exactly the same on every platform. The app is the OS, the actual OS is just a hardware abstraction layer.
Can Flutter be used to build apps like Figma or Ableton or Emacs? I actually don’t think so. It’s a poor toolkit for building anything that must last for more than 3-5 years. If you care about longevity, there are basically only three options in 2026: Qt, Electron, or roll your own like Zed/Sublime.
This is coming from a native framework evangelist for many years, and then just tried flutter early days (which was far more difficult than how easy it is today). Now I write almost all my projects in flutter/dart where I can, especially with AI the speed from idea to production is insane.
This weekend I had an idea I set out to experiment with: if I have an existing React Native app, how much effort would it take an LLM to rewrite it into genuinely native apps. My idea being I no longer need to write cross-platform code and pay the intermediary framework costs, I’d get direct access to the underlying platform. Instead, I could just spec the features I need in the app and the LLM can build it.
It took me a year to build the original app to production quality by hand. My “twins”, as they’ve become known, were at 80% completion in three days of on-off work.
I’m pretty much convinced my experiment was a success. Which sorta terrifies me that I’ve specialised in a technology that can be, for all intents and purposes, be entirely erased.
The only caveat I can find is it is still a great technology for doing cross-platform mobile and web. Using something like Tamagui (as rough as that can be sometimes) allows genuine code sharing across all platforms.
Sucks most that I’m now actively looking for a new React Native role.
I'm trying it now with an app and so far it's working really well. I build what I can cross platform, the non-ui stuff, then have AI build the UI for each platform.
It even implemented native low-level graphics on each platform: metal, vulkan, and d3d12. It builds SwiftUI on Apple platforms, WinUI3 on Windows, GTK4 on Linux, Compose on Android. The cross platform stuff is Zig with a C ABI.
And yeah, it's a bit terrifying how fast you can iterate. I've built for all these platforms in about a month. It would have taken at least a year, maybe more before. I haven't even optimized the process by having AI agents follow my lead automatically, so as I finish features on the primary platform they could start building the others by watching. Requires some setup I haven't tackled yet (VMs for all platforms with agents waiting).
One downside for sure is lack of deep knowledge on all these platforms can make it difficult to see issues.
Relying on WASM means that nobody on Apple platforms who has Lockdown Mode enabled for better security will be able to use it.
its a cross platform framework that you can share component between mobile and other platform and always has been
Now I might vibe code such things using React, but 5 , 6 years ago Flutter got me what I wanted fast.
Firebase integration is absurdly easy. You can make a crud app in about 30 minutes
It's super nice.
Still, Flutter now feels ancient to use compared to something like Compose, in that regard.
LOC is dead, long live token usage.
How does such a basic feature only get added so late?
The language, like any other, does have some weaker parts, but in general is _very_ nice to write in - thanks to both the language itself and the toolchain built around it.
The apps compile to native binaries for production and are run in Dart VM during development. The SDK is multi purpose. You can write "scripts", you can write CLI apps, servers and with Flutter - the rest of them.
https://serverpod.dev/
The web app is here: https://app.vocabuo.com (completely free) And the links for Android/iOS builds are here: https://vocabuo.com (soft paywall)
To an untrained eye who does not care about dropping a few frames, the web version is almost indistinguishable from the "native" build. Especially if you add it to homescreen from safari to hide the navigation bar.
I think Dart and Flutter are very overlooked. The language has completely changed since its release, its statically typed, has null safety, enums, and pattern matching, and is very simple and easy to read. It has fast compilation and a ui framework with hot reload. It's as fast as Js on v8 while using less memory and has the overlooked feature of having very fast, almost 0 overhead, ffi.
I think the importance of good ffi is underrated for these ui languages. For reference, everyone that's using electron has to run two node processes doing ipc over a websocket connection. That's going to waste an absurd number of cpu cycles and memory when you are passing messages around when your app is basically a ui for a cli.
Got any case studies?
Note that Dart or Flutter are nowhere to be found on Android developer documentation.
Flutter made a lot of sense during the Oracle lawsuit when Google needed a way to show Oracle that it can pivot from Java. Now it no longer makes sense but the inertia is too deep.
My guess is that flutter is sold internally through the Huawei support as a leg within China.
At some point there's just not much exciting new stuff to add. Flutter is a nice stable platform, I'd highly recommend it.
And that new rendering engine is also why apps like Immich are unable to show HDR photos. Apple & Google both pushed broad support for that a couple years ago, with things like Ultra HDR and subsequently ISO 21496-1.
Meanwhile Flutter still doesn't really have wide gamut support https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/189155
Of course they need to prioritize where to spend resources, like any project, but Flutter also doesn't seem to be on any critical path for fancy headlining new features, either.
Also, Google dogfoods it quite a bit.
https://flutter.dev/showcase/nubank
Archive link: https://archive.is/IIUaj
I really don't understand how/why people deny reality so hard when it comes to Flutter. Reminds me a bit of years ago when people were still scoffing at the idea of anyone actually adopting JavaScript to write web servers with while Node.js was very obviously eating up the market.
I understand it's limitations vs native apps, but there's quite a few cases where it really doesn't matter.
The biggest one for me is always the fear it will be abandoned. Pretty much goes for any cross platform app framework though.
I used to work at ByteDance and they alone employed I think more than 800 Flutter Devs. Douyin uses Flutter (the Chinese version of TikTok), Grab and Ebay use it, Alibaba and Baidu did too. Toyota and Volkswagen I think both use Flutter. Nubank I think is also a flutter app and they alone have like one hundred million some users.
With the popularity in the Chinese ecosystem alone there's gotta be a billion plus people using flutter.
Gonna check out the app
So they're probably investing in it enough for basic maintenance, but don't really care about evolving the language.
It's been over a decade since then, though, and I'm out of touch now.
Killing Flutter would not promote a manager. For now, of course.
I personally would like for it to pick up some ideas from Svelte.
Flutter can get you up and running quickly. If I want cross-plaform support, one codebase is hard to beat.
lol.
The main reason i can think of is generics not existing initially
- we wanted hot reload
- it was supposed to feel familiar to web developers and reasonable to native developers
- iOS needed AOT compilation for speed since we couldn't use a JIT
- TypeScript had literally just reached 1.0
- Swift looked promising, but the Oracle lawsuit made the idea of using it tenuous
- Kotlin was not even 1.0 yet, that wouldn't happen for 2 more years
- Go made huge binaries. The language was also lacking features like generics and Go was unwilling to add them (remember this is 2014).
- v8 was not interested in AOT, but Dart was willing to dramatically invest in flutter
There were probably other reasons too I'm forgetting.
Dart was a really pragmatic choice to ship quickly. I have mixed feels about how the decision has aged over time, and wish we had things like Hermes and WASM back then, and a willingness to build a TypeScript compiler like other native frameworks (ex. Valdi)... But for the time I think the choice was reasonable.
On the technical side, Flutter needed AOT compilation to native ARM for release builds and a JIT for development (that's what makes stateful hot reload possible). Dart does both from one codebase. TypeScript means shipping a JS VM, which is precisely the overhead Flutter was designed to avoid. (In contrast to RN). Dart's other big win is GC tuned for allocating and throwing away tons of short-lived objects which is what happens when you hot reload over and over.
Go has no JIT, so no hot reload, and no generics until 2022, Flutter has a big widget library so that would not have been possible.
And of course the Dart team was inside Google, and had just lost its original mission when Chrome declined to ship the Dart VM, and was willing to change the language to suit Flutter.
Iirc the reason is that the Dart team was willing to heavily modify the language and runtime to accommodate the needs of Flutter and the V8 team wasn't.
I think this is the video that talks about this: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xqGAC5QCYuQ