7 ms·

Start learning. It has never been this easy to learn and build an App. I would certainly recommend Flutter/Dart rather than any JS framework. Since you mentione

Start learning. It has never been this easy to learn and build an App. I would certainly recommend Flutter/Dart rather than any JS framework. Since you mentioned Java, I personally think you will find working with Dart comfortable. Flutter is cross platform and now you can also build Web apps, though it is in beta. Flutter makes it easy for developers to play with the design aspect of application development so it will be a great way to get insight and learn a few things. It will be always challenging to outsource if you are not sure about the capabilities or reliability of developer or team you want to work with.

swiley 7y ago
Dart feels like one of those google things kind of like chromium where the first step in setting up for building it requires (more or less) becoming a google employee.
- latchkey 7y ago
  I personally downvoted you because this comment just is not helpful. You don't need to ever 'build' Dart unless you're going to be working on the language itself... and if you are, you might as well be a google employee and get paid for it. Setup for Flutter development is just a few easy steps.
fauigerzigerk 7y ago
I agree with starting to learn. But whether or not Flutter is the right choice may depend the app. Flutter allegedly consumes about twice as much memory as a native app. So I guess it matters who the target audience is and what kind of device specification can be expected. Disclaimer: I have never written a Flutter app and I'm not sure if the information I have found is still up-to-date.
- la_fayette 7y ago
  Can you give any sources for twice as much memory argument of flutter compared to native? What do you mean with memory exactly, is resulting binary twice as big or does the flutter app neads twice as much main memory?
  - fauigerzigerk 7y ago
    I was looking for some benchmarks two weeks ago because I find Flutter interesting, and I found two benchmarks showing twice as much RAM usage at runtime (not the app binary) for some simple demo app. I no longer have the link, but I can try to find it. Edit: What I have also found is that there are plans (or ongoing work) to port Flutter to Apple's Metal framework, which should cut memory usage by a lot on iOS. Edit 2: Here's one of the benchmarks: https://thoughtbot.com/blog/examining-performance-differences-between-native-flutter-and-react-native-mobile-development-take-two https://thoughtbot.com/blog/examining-performance-difference...
    - la_fayette 7y ago
      Hey cool thank you! This is an interessting question how different cross platform approaches compare in terms of performance.
- listenallyall 7y ago
  >> Flutter allegedly consumes about twice as much memory as a native app. Would be interesting to benchmark Flutter's memory use vs. the app that was never built because of the lack of time, steep learning curve, boredom, etc, to deliver both iOS and Android natively.
apl002 7y ago
I have never explored Flutter. Coming from a web background, React Native made the most sense for me. Since I started using it a year ago, I absolutely love it. Great community with constant updates from Facebook, tons of articles/blogs/courses on how to learn it and there hasn't been a single feature Ive wanted to build but couldn't due to some lib restriction
- latchkey 7y ago
  I'm a backend/web dev and recently built an app with flutter over RN. The reason I picked flutter was more about the component/widgets... flutter has them built in. This allows me to just focus on building features over trying to figure out which things to use with RN.
  - apl002 7y ago
    What kind of components/widgets are you referring to? RN has a lot built in and then there are a good number maintained by the community. As far as custom UI components I know some people use libs like NativeBase but I handroll my own
pcr910303 7y ago
As always: quoting my comment[0] about flutter: > We really should be trying to use the native GUI toolkit (or cross-platform native UI libraries like libui), not using Flutter-esque libraries that draws everything from scratch. Coherent UI is a very important point to users IMO. Users can assume that some special feature from App X will also work on App Y. For example, in macOS Cocoa, textboxes have universal readline-esque keybindings (and is configurable globally) which, as an Emacs user, very, very useful. Most Mac apps use Cocoa as the GUI toolkit, so basically all kinds of apps can benefit these keybindings. Another example of this directly benefiting users is the addition of tabs in macOS Sierra. macOS Sierra added tabs to Cocoa apps, and applications could get the feature without additional modification. I can use tabs in any application, with the same look-and-feel, in all apps. Stories like these are mostly only macOS; since Windows apps usually just re-invent all kinds of UI elements, while Linux's GUI toolkits are super-fragmented. (GTK vs Qt is one thing, and there are lots of other options!) Adding Flutter or any other UI library that draws everything from scratch is a bad idea. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20612195 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20612195
- BoorishBears 7y ago
  If you want to make a product, use what ever tool is most productive for you. Unless you're writing an IDE, you're not going to lose users (you care about) over not supporting Emacs bindings. People will put up with a lot of garbage if your product fills a need. And non-native UI is not even inherently garbage, just sub-optimal (and even that depends on the product)
  - pcr910303 7y ago
    Well, just Emacs bindings are not the point; it’s that non-native widgets don’t respect the user’s intent of customizing the whole OS. Let’s take another example: macOS supports Dark Mode from Mojave... and Electron apps usually don’t implement them, or if they do: with a separate toggle. Yeah, these aren’t great deals, but people who care enough try to switch to alternatives. And by using native UIs, you can mitigate your concerns about whether you implemented everything the user expects or not.
rohansingh 7y ago
As someone in a similar position as the OP, I definitely recommend Flutter. I'm working on a new hardware startup, and my team has strong backed and infra experience. That jives well with our product, but we do also need a mobile app to interface with the product. Flutter has been great in this regard. Dart and the declarative UX framework are very grokkable for backend folks. The UI/UX is definitely good enough. Our app feels native, is snappy enough to get the job done, and looks way better than the native Android app we were trying to build before. Even if we were to have to go fully native down the road, Flutter is just the right tool for the job of getting us off the ground. For a small team, there's just no way we could build both an iOS and Android app separately, on top of hardware, firmware, and a backend. It would kill us before we ever even launched.
- saagarjha 7y ago
  > The UI/UX is definitely good enough. Our app feels native, is snappy enough to get the job done n.b. to you.
  - latchkey 7y ago
    Sure, but they are correct and you're focused on the premature optimization. I've also built a small flutter app where everything runs snappy and it more than solved the needs with a minimal development time and number of lines of code.
    - saagarjha 7y ago
      If you’re happy and your users are happy with Flutter, go right ahead with it. But please don’t be the all-too-common startup that writes blog posts about their “coding velocity” with Flutter (of course, they can’t afford to hire talent for anything else) while they keep their fingers in their ears as users scream about usability or missing platform functionality.
      - latchkey 7y ago
        My users have no idea it is flutter, that is the best part.
bg117 7y ago
Flutter is declarative. UI is rendered each time completely. Will it not consume more power? In an increasingly warming world, is it a wise choice to use Flutter?

swiley 7y ago

Dart feels like one of those google things kind of like chromium where the first step in setting up for building it requires (more or less) becoming a google employee.

latchkey 7y ago
I personally downvoted you because this comment just is not helpful. You don't need to ever 'build' Dart unless you're going to be working on the language itself... and if you are, you might as well be a google employee and get paid for it. Setup for Flutter development is just a few easy steps.

fauigerzigerk 7y ago

I agree with starting to learn. But whether or not Flutter is the right choice may depend the app. Flutter allegedly consumes about twice as much memory as a native app. So I guess it matters who the target audience is and what kind of device specification can be expected. Disclaimer: I have never written a Flutter app and I'm not sure if the information I have found is still up-to-date.

la_fayette 7y ago
Can you give any sources for twice as much memory argument of flutter compared to native? What do you mean with memory exactly, is resulting binary twice as big or does the flutter app neads twice as much main memory?
- fauigerzigerk 7y ago
  I was looking for some benchmarks two weeks ago because I find Flutter interesting, and I found two benchmarks showing twice as much RAM usage at runtime (not the app binary) for some simple demo app. I no longer have the link, but I can try to find it. Edit: What I have also found is that there are plans (or ongoing work) to port Flutter to Apple's Metal framework, which should cut memory usage by a lot on iOS. Edit 2: Here's one of the benchmarks: https://thoughtbot.com/blog/examining-performance-differences-between-native-flutter-and-react-native-mobile-development-take-two https://thoughtbot.com/blog/examining-performance-difference...
  - la_fayette 7y ago
    Hey cool thank you! This is an interessting question how different cross platform approaches compare in terms of performance.
listenallyall 7y ago
>> Flutter allegedly consumes about twice as much memory as a native app. Would be interesting to benchmark Flutter's memory use vs. the app that was never built because of the lack of time, steep learning curve, boredom, etc, to deliver both iOS and Android natively.

apl002 7y ago

I have never explored Flutter. Coming from a web background, React Native made the most sense for me. Since I started using it a year ago, I absolutely love it. Great community with constant updates from Facebook, tons of articles/blogs/courses on how to learn it and there hasn't been a single feature Ive wanted to build but couldn't due to some lib restriction

latchkey 7y ago
I'm a backend/web dev and recently built an app with flutter over RN. The reason I picked flutter was more about the component/widgets... flutter has them built in. This allows me to just focus on building features over trying to figure out which things to use with RN.
- apl002 7y ago
  What kind of components/widgets are you referring to? RN has a lot built in and then there are a good number maintained by the community. As far as custom UI components I know some people use libs like NativeBase but I handroll my own

pcr910303 7y ago

As always: quoting my comment[0] about flutter: > We really should be trying to use the native GUI toolkit (or cross-platform native UI libraries like libui), not using Flutter-esque libraries that draws everything from scratch. Coherent UI is a very important point to users IMO. Users can assume that some special feature from App X will also work on App Y. For example, in macOS Cocoa, textboxes have universal readline-esque keybindings (and is configurable globally) which, as an Emacs user, very, very useful. Most Mac apps use Cocoa as the GUI toolkit, so basically all kinds of apps can benefit these keybindings. Another example of this directly benefiting users is the addition of tabs in macOS Sierra. macOS Sierra added tabs to Cocoa apps, and applications could get the feature without additional modification. I can use tabs in any application, with the same look-and-feel, in all apps. Stories like these are mostly only macOS; since Windows apps usually just re-invent all kinds of UI elements, while Linux's GUI toolkits are super-fragmented. (GTK vs Qt is one thing, and there are lots of other options!) Adding Flutter or any other UI library that draws everything from scratch is a bad idea. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20612195 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20612195

BoorishBears 7y ago
If you want to make a product, use what ever tool is most productive for you. Unless you're writing an IDE, you're not going to lose users (you care about) over not supporting Emacs bindings. People will put up with a lot of garbage if your product fills a need. And non-native UI is not even inherently garbage, just sub-optimal (and even that depends on the product)
- pcr910303 7y ago
  Well, just Emacs bindings are not the point; it’s that non-native widgets don’t respect the user’s intent of customizing the whole OS. Let’s take another example: macOS supports Dark Mode from Mojave... and Electron apps usually don’t implement them, or if they do: with a separate toggle. Yeah, these aren’t great deals, but people who care enough try to switch to alternatives. And by using native UIs, you can mitigate your concerns about whether you implemented everything the user expects or not.

rohansingh 7y ago

As someone in a similar position as the OP, I definitely recommend Flutter. I'm working on a new hardware startup, and my team has strong backed and infra experience. That jives well with our product, but we do also need a mobile app to interface with the product. Flutter has been great in this regard. Dart and the declarative UX framework are very grokkable for backend folks. The UI/UX is definitely good enough. Our app feels native, is snappy enough to get the job done, and looks way better than the native Android app we were trying to build before. Even if we were to have to go fully native down the road, Flutter is just the right tool for the job of getting us off the ground. For a small team, there's just no way we could build both an iOS and Android app separately, on top of hardware, firmware, and a backend. It would kill us before we ever even launched.

saagarjha 7y ago
> The UI/UX is definitely good enough. Our app feels native, is snappy enough to get the job done n.b. to you.
- latchkey 7y ago
  Sure, but they are correct and you're focused on the premature optimization. I've also built a small flutter app where everything runs snappy and it more than solved the needs with a minimal development time and number of lines of code.
  - saagarjha 7y ago
    If you’re happy and your users are happy with Flutter, go right ahead with it. But please don’t be the all-too-common startup that writes blog posts about their “coding velocity” with Flutter (of course, they can’t afford to hire talent for anything else) while they keep their fingers in their ears as users scream about usability or missing platform functionality.
    - latchkey 7y ago
      My users have no idea it is flutter, that is the best part.

bg117 7y ago

Flutter is declarative. UI is rendered each time completely. Will it not consume more power? In an increasingly warming world, is it a wise choice to use Flutter?