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I think building a toy app for yourself is among the best ways to decide for yourself which framework to go with! The conclusions from the article were: > Cre

I think building a toy app for yourself is among the best ways to decide for yourself which framework to go with! The conclusions from the article were: > Creating the Flutter application only took approximately ⅓ of the time it took to create both native applications combined. This proves how much time you save by using cross-platform frameworks. Their Hot Reload functionality also sped up the development cycle a lot. > I was able to create the Flutter app faster than the React Native app, but that’s because I had more experience with Flutter than with React Native. I also didn’t know how to manage state properly in the React Native. That’s why declare both Flutter and React Native the winners of this experiment. For performance, Bram wrote: > It’s obvious that the CPU-usage of the Flutter application is smaller than that of the React Native and Xamarin Forms applications, and that’s why I declare Flutter the winner of this experiment. > In the second experiment it was concluded that the Flutter application was less taxing on the CPU than the React Native and Xamarin Forms applications. This doesn’t automatically prove that Flutter is more performant than React Native or Xamarin Forms. > There are a lot of features that the Cocktailr app doesn’t have, like caching for example. That would reduce the amount of network requests that need to be made and would make the app more performant, meaning that it could lead to different results. I also only used CPU-usage as a performance indicator. I don’t have any data on the memory or battery consumption for example. These are also an important performance indicators. We at Wanderlog (https://wanderlog.com https://wanderlog.com) are using React Native largely because the ecosystem around it is a bit more mature than Flutter's at the moment. It's definitely saved us time vs. writing native code. We've definitely run into issues, and I think the main things we'd want to test as alternate performance indicators if we were choosing a framework again are: 1. How performant/easy-to-implement are long scrolling lists 2. How easy is it to animate the dimensions of Views that affect layouts of other views 3. How many libraries are there for things that will be dealt with native code? Dealing with the boundary with native code is always going to be tough

bweitzman 7y ago
I tried writing a small app using Flutter. It was really a fantastic experience IMO. To answer some of your questions: 1. Long lists are pretty painless to implement. There a some helper views included for building list views that aren't backed by in memory lists, and they feel really nice and fluid (https://api.flutter.dev/flutter/widgets/ListView/ListView.builder.html https://api.flutter.dev/flutter/widgets/ListView/ListView.bu...) 2. Flutter has lots of built in animation support. Almost every aspect of a view is animatable out of the box (see https://api.flutter.dev/flutter/widgets/AnimatedContainer-class.html https://api.flutter.dev/flutter/widgets/AnimatedContainer-cl... for an example). I definitely got carried away with the animations because of how fun and easy they were! 3. I had to deal with native code for push notifications, sharing flows, and universal links. Google publishes libraries for dealing with a lot of the common stuff, and there's great community support as well.
verttii 7y ago
My experience with Flutter is that you need a lot less native code than you do with React Native. However, the hands down best part is the tooling. Unlike on react native everything just works on Flutter. It doesn't feel nearly as fragile.
on_and_off 7y ago
>his proves how much time you save by using cross-platform frameworks not sure it proves much since the author went about this in a really really weird way. From the snippets shown, this is extremely unidiomatic Android code, it looks a lot more Flutter code. which makes sense since the author seems like they were trying to write Flutter code on another platform. And even if they went about it in a more productive way, I am not sure what the feedback of one beginner dev having spend 20 hours on each platform is supposed to mean about anything.

bweitzman 7y ago

I tried writing a small app using Flutter. It was really a fantastic experience IMO. To answer some of your questions: 1. Long lists are pretty painless to implement. There a some helper views included for building list views that aren't backed by in memory lists, and they feel really nice and fluid (https://api.flutter.dev/flutter/widgets/ListView/ListView.builder.html https://api.flutter.dev/flutter/widgets/ListView/ListView.bu...) 2. Flutter has lots of built in animation support. Almost every aspect of a view is animatable out of the box (see https://api.flutter.dev/flutter/widgets/AnimatedContainer-class.html https://api.flutter.dev/flutter/widgets/AnimatedContainer-cl... for an example). I definitely got carried away with the animations because of how fun and easy they were! 3. I had to deal with native code for push notifications, sharing flows, and universal links. Google publishes libraries for dealing with a lot of the common stuff, and there's great community support as well.

verttii 7y ago

My experience with Flutter is that you need a lot less native code than you do with React Native. However, the hands down best part is the tooling. Unlike on react native everything just works on Flutter. It doesn't feel nearly as fragile.

on_and_off 7y ago

>his proves how much time you save by using cross-platform frameworks not sure it proves much since the author went about this in a really really weird way. From the snippets shown, this is extremely unidiomatic Android code, it looks a lot more Flutter code. which makes sense since the author seems like they were trying to write Flutter code on another platform. And even if they went about it in a more productive way, I am not sure what the feedback of one beginner dev having spend 20 hours on each platform is supposed to mean about anything.