6 ms·

Flutter seems to be gaining ground on React Native. And they also have web and desktop ports. Recently flutter overtook react native on Google trends.

KaoruAoiShiho 6y ago
Any other evidence? I don't "feel" this, flutter seems to be floundering from what I've seen.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- bsaul 6y ago
  Same feeling here. still waiting for that killer flutter app to convince me one can actually build a real app with decent latency in flutter
  - chirau 6y ago
    What do you mean by killer exactly? Splice is now on flutter, including web. I'd say that is a pretty demanding app.
    - wtetzner 6y ago
      A killer app is something like Rails. Rails made Ruby popular, because it was so good that people who otherwise wouldn't have been interested in Ruby were willing to use it for the benefits they got from Rails.
      - satvikpendem 6y ago
        I suppose Flutter is Dart's killer app, since you're comparing frameworks and languages. Rails is to Ruby as Flutter is to Dart, as it were. I suggest you give it a try. Personally, this felt like the "killer" feature to me, fully advanced animations that I'm not sure are possible on native widget based frameworks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCyoHclCqc8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCyoHclCqc8
      - hopia 6y ago
        Wouldn't Flutter be the killer app to Dart as Rails was to Ruby by your analogy?
        wtetzner 6y ago
        Maybe? I don't know enough about it to say. I was just trying to clarify what a "killer app" was by using an example.
    - dmix 6y ago
      I checked out Splice and they are using Angular/Rails for their web app? Both builtwith and HTML source code for their marketing website and logged in app indicate this. I watched their talk video [1] and they seemed to have only built an MVPish app using Flutter (ie, less than a year using it + a team of two devs). And it only seems to be for the desktop app? Maybe I'm missing where they are using it on the web... but I wouldn't call this a huge buy in. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FcjPNKmyrlM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FcjPNKmyrlM
    - bsaul 6y ago
      I mean an app with a large user base built in majority with flutter.
- ProAm 6y ago
  The problem with flutter is you never know when Google will stop investing in the product at any moment when the devs shift their priority.and let it die on the vine.
  - happa 6y ago
    People love to say this but rarely provide concrete examples. Google has a habit of discontinuing unsuccessful services, not technologies like SDKs or whole programming languages.
    - NateEag 6y ago
      Angular.js is currently causing problems for me, as it's going to be unsupported in about a year.
      - fastball 6y ago
        https://angular.io/guide/upgrade https://angular.io/guide/upgrade
        NateEag 6y ago
        The point is precisely that I have to do that. GP asked for evidence of Google abandoning things, and Angular.js is exactly that. Upgrading to an incompatible framework is not supporting the old one.
        fastball 6y ago
        If you can "upgrade", then it's not incompatible. Every major revision of software has breaking changes (or as you call them, "incompatibilities"), some more than others (see Python 2 -> 3). That doesn't mean it's "abandoned". Google made major API changes and renamed it to better communicate that it's not some simple JS framework – calling that abandoned is disingenuous. It's only abandoned in-so-far as every old version of every software ever gets abandoned at some point.
liquidise 6y ago
Particularly outside of the US, in my experience. Having spent considerable time in React, RN, and Flutter the difference is remarkable. Unless devs are big fans of JS, Flutter is a compelling alternative [1]. 1: https://blog.benroux.me/us-devs-are-sleeping-on-flutter/ https://blog.benroux.me/us-devs-are-sleeping-on-flutter/
- yesimahuman 6y ago
  Your conclusion re: Cordova is pretty outdated. Also these days folks are moving to Capacitor instead.
  - notJim 6y ago
    Cordova has a pretty high "Would not use again" score: https://2019.stateofjs.com/mobile-desktop/cordova/ https://2019.stateofjs.com/mobile-desktop/cordova/. No data on Flutter or Capacitor unfortunately.
RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago
Windows Forms was released on 2002 and is still supported by Microsoft. How long do you think Flutter will be supported by Google? For dev technology, Microsoft has a well-deserved reputation for supporting products for a long time.
- int_19h 6y ago
  It... depends. Remember Silverlight?
  - unsignedint 6y ago
    The last version of Silverlight, Silverlight 5 is actually supported until next year, 10 years after the initial 5.x release, which is not really "short" by any standard. It's mostly the browser's ecosystem moved away from these for more standard based approaches.
    - int_19h 6y ago
      "Supported" in a sense of patching security holes, sure. Not so much in a sense of writing new apps in it, or using modern tools to maintain old apps (support was dropped in VS 2017). So in that regard it's very unlike MFC or WinForms, which both enjoy continuous tooling support, and fixes and minor enhancements outside of security. FWIW, I think your criticism is broadly valid, in that it's more of an exception for Microsoft, but much more common for Google. It's not hard to look at the Windows dev ecosystem, and see which parts of it are very stable, and likely to be around long term - because they have already been around for very long indeed.
      - unsignedint 6y ago
        I think the difference between MFC and WinForms, compared to Silverlight is that former are still widely used. albeit less than in the past with a lot more prevalence of web based applications. Silverlight in other hand is a technology no modern web browsers support (in the same camp with gradually deprecated Flash and everything that requires plugins.), and perhaps to Microsoft it's a lot less justifiable to update it beyond security update.
yesimahuman 6y ago
I would be careful with Flutter’s web port. It’s going to be a pretty divergent approach in terms of web dev familiarity, bundle size, and compatibility with native web features (they had to implement copy and paste from scratch, for example). It is very similar to the approach Famous took back when. It is not looked kindly upon by many web platform advocates I know.
- gitgud 6y ago
  The Flutter web port is ridiculous. It circumvents the entire point of a Web page as it's literally just a canvas on the Web page. You lose all advantages that HTML and CSS gives you, links, styling, accessibility, text selection! ... It's basically a flash website... Which admittedly is okay for some applications
  - _bxg1 6y ago
    It's Flash all over again, with a fresh coat of paint.
  - contextfree 6y ago
    Isn't this consistent with Flutter's approach in general, though? On iOS, Android, etc., it uses its own widget toolkit and does its own rendering, it's not a wrapper over the native toolkits and renderers.
  - exacube 6y ago
    You might be misinformed; according to https://medium.com/flutter/hummingbird-building-flutter-for-the-web-e687c2a023a8 https://medium.com/flutter/hummingbird-building-flutter-for-... Flutter for Web uses HTML & CSS where it can, and falls back to Canvas where it can't. Flutter for Web is still on Beta, so lets see where it lands. Today, it seems to implement some PWA practices and lazyloading to try and get some performance.
    - gitgud 6y ago
      Well that article is from 2018 and kind of overemphasises the HTML and CSS where it can. Checkout the official [1] Flutter web demos. Even the simplest [2] example renders basically every part of the UI (including text!!) within canvas elements, which is a bit crazy to me... but yes it's still Beta, so we'll see what they can improve [1] https://flutter.github.io/samples/#?platform=web https://flutter.github.io/samples/#?platform=web [2] https://flutter.github.io/samples/web/animations/#/ https://flutter.github.io/samples/web/animations/#/
aylmao 6y ago
> Recently flutter overtook react native on Google trends. How did you query this? I want to have a look, but the fact "flutter" shows data since 2004 means the terms I'm using are inflated [1]. Flutter is a dictionary word after all. [1]: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=react%20native,flutter https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=r...
- joan_kode 6y ago
  Don't limit your search to the US. The "dictionary word" problem is reduced in worldwide search, which shows a more convincing trend for flutter. Though I wouldn't say it has a large or clear-cut lead on React Native. https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=react%20native,flutter https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=react%20...
  - aylmao 6y ago
    Oh true, good idea!
JoeOfTexas 6y ago
The community is finally at its first apex. I tried it this past weekend, and the VSCode setup was so sexy and easy to get started. I dropped React-Native in a heart beat, even losing a few weeks of work. The biggest gripe I have with React-Native is the many JS packages on npm that we can't use due to how the code is exported. It's a huge hack job, which Flutter absolutely destroyed by having everything I needed as a package that just worked. One thing I'm looking at on Flutter, is how their public packages age. If I can't use a 3 year old package on modern day Flutter, there will be some big problems coming soon.
- scotth 6y ago
  A three year old package would be an issue with Flutter. The move to Dart 2 was not backwards compatible. That said, there's an effort in the community to find maintainers for older packages that people find useful. If you come across something that you need, post back, or shoot me an email.
Sophistifunk 6y ago
Flutter on desktop has been "right around the corner" for about 5 years now.
- drewbitt 6y ago
  But Flutter didn't come out until 2017?
  - Sophistifunk 6y ago
    Not for iOS and for the public, but Google had been talking about and demoing for a long time before that.
- scotth 6y ago
  I've been building in Flutter for desktop (macOS) for a year and a half. It's _still_ feeling early, but if you're comfortable writing a bit of native code, it pretty much just works (for single window applications — hopefully that changes soon).
  - Sophistifunk 6y ago
    Writing code I'm fine with, it's coaxing other peoples' code to build that drives me nuts.
owenversteeg 6y ago
Flutter on the web is absolutely insane. For those who don't know, it basically strips away everything and wraps it in a big terrifyingly complex mess of code and renders everything in a canvas. Flutter advocates like to claim that that's "only a fallback" for when things get complex but as far as I can tell the vast majority of things (including the simplest examples from Flutter itself) force the entire thing into canvas: it's basically Flash 2.0, but worse. I seriously hope that Flutter fades. It's very dangerous in many ways. Even ignoring the huge downsides of basically having a new Flash, consider this: the massive Flutter layer is, surprise surprise, yet another Google project that is magically _significantly_ slower in Firefox. I don't mean a small difference here, I mean that on a brand new fancy flagship I tested on, Flutter in Chrome is buttery smooth and Flutter in Firefox is a miserable, laggy experience. If it gets popular, this will become yet another reason pushing people off Firefox and cementing Google's dominance of the web. Flutter is a very, very dangerous thing.
- snodnipper 6y ago
  Adobe Flex was my most productive client development experience over the past 20 years. I transitioned to Android _but_ there were many hideous things with that (e.g. ghastly emulator, legacy Java support etc.). My personal hope is that Flutter gains traction and the web can move beyond current web/native technology. Postscript / PDFs aren't suitable for game experiences...and to my mind web standards have been shoehorned into supporting web apps, where there is a mismatch with native technologies. I'd like to think that Flutter can help bridge that gap. This is not to say that accessibility etc. should be ignored...nor better support in Firefox...but even Brendan Eich is using Blink/V8 with Brave. Anyhow, thoughts of one.
  - nojvek 6y ago
    Ahhhh Adobe Flex with MXML and ActionScript3. Before Typescript and React with JSX got popular that was the cool kids club. RIAs yo! Rich internet applications. I loved what Flex brought to the table. Too bad Adobe didn’t open source flash and let it die.
    - 6y ago

KaoruAoiShiho 6y ago

Any other evidence? I don't "feel" this, flutter seems to be floundering from what I've seen.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
bsaul 6y ago
Same feeling here. still waiting for that killer flutter app to convince me one can actually build a real app with decent latency in flutter
- chirau 6y ago
  What do you mean by killer exactly? Splice is now on flutter, including web. I'd say that is a pretty demanding app.
  - wtetzner 6y ago
    A killer app is something like Rails. Rails made Ruby popular, because it was so good that people who otherwise wouldn't have been interested in Ruby were willing to use it for the benefits they got from Rails.
    - satvikpendem 6y ago
      I suppose Flutter is Dart's killer app, since you're comparing frameworks and languages. Rails is to Ruby as Flutter is to Dart, as it were. I suggest you give it a try. Personally, this felt like the "killer" feature to me, fully advanced animations that I'm not sure are possible on native widget based frameworks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCyoHclCqc8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCyoHclCqc8
    - hopia 6y ago
      Wouldn't Flutter be the killer app to Dart as Rails was to Ruby by your analogy?
      - wtetzner 6y ago
        Maybe? I don't know enough about it to say. I was just trying to clarify what a "killer app" was by using an example.
  - dmix 6y ago
    I checked out Splice and they are using Angular/Rails for their web app? Both builtwith and HTML source code for their marketing website and logged in app indicate this. I watched their talk video [1] and they seemed to have only built an MVPish app using Flutter (ie, less than a year using it + a team of two devs). And it only seems to be for the desktop app? Maybe I'm missing where they are using it on the web... but I wouldn't call this a huge buy in. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FcjPNKmyrlM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FcjPNKmyrlM
  - bsaul 6y ago
    I mean an app with a large user base built in majority with flutter.
ProAm 6y ago
The problem with flutter is you never know when Google will stop investing in the product at any moment when the devs shift their priority.and let it die on the vine.
- happa 6y ago
  People love to say this but rarely provide concrete examples. Google has a habit of discontinuing unsuccessful services, not technologies like SDKs or whole programming languages.
  - NateEag 6y ago
    Angular.js is currently causing problems for me, as it's going to be unsupported in about a year.
    - fastball 6y ago
      https://angular.io/guide/upgrade https://angular.io/guide/upgrade
      - NateEag 6y ago
        The point is precisely that I have to do that. GP asked for evidence of Google abandoning things, and Angular.js is exactly that. Upgrading to an incompatible framework is not supporting the old one.
        fastball 6y ago
        If you can "upgrade", then it's not incompatible. Every major revision of software has breaking changes (or as you call them, "incompatibilities"), some more than others (see Python 2 -> 3). That doesn't mean it's "abandoned". Google made major API changes and renamed it to better communicate that it's not some simple JS framework – calling that abandoned is disingenuous. It's only abandoned in-so-far as every old version of every software ever gets abandoned at some point.

liquidise 6y ago

Particularly outside of the US, in my experience. Having spent considerable time in React, RN, and Flutter the difference is remarkable. Unless devs are big fans of JS, Flutter is a compelling alternative [1]. 1: https://blog.benroux.me/us-devs-are-sleeping-on-flutter/ https://blog.benroux.me/us-devs-are-sleeping-on-flutter/

yesimahuman 6y ago
Your conclusion re: Cordova is pretty outdated. Also these days folks are moving to Capacitor instead.
- notJim 6y ago
  Cordova has a pretty high "Would not use again" score: https://2019.stateofjs.com/mobile-desktop/cordova/ https://2019.stateofjs.com/mobile-desktop/cordova/. No data on Flutter or Capacitor unfortunately.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago

Windows Forms was released on 2002 and is still supported by Microsoft. How long do you think Flutter will be supported by Google? For dev technology, Microsoft has a well-deserved reputation for supporting products for a long time.

int_19h 6y ago
It... depends. Remember Silverlight?
- unsignedint 6y ago
  The last version of Silverlight, Silverlight 5 is actually supported until next year, 10 years after the initial 5.x release, which is not really "short" by any standard. It's mostly the browser's ecosystem moved away from these for more standard based approaches.
  - int_19h 6y ago
    "Supported" in a sense of patching security holes, sure. Not so much in a sense of writing new apps in it, or using modern tools to maintain old apps (support was dropped in VS 2017). So in that regard it's very unlike MFC or WinForms, which both enjoy continuous tooling support, and fixes and minor enhancements outside of security. FWIW, I think your criticism is broadly valid, in that it's more of an exception for Microsoft, but much more common for Google. It's not hard to look at the Windows dev ecosystem, and see which parts of it are very stable, and likely to be around long term - because they have already been around for very long indeed.
    - unsignedint 6y ago
      I think the difference between MFC and WinForms, compared to Silverlight is that former are still widely used. albeit less than in the past with a lot more prevalence of web based applications. Silverlight in other hand is a technology no modern web browsers support (in the same camp with gradually deprecated Flash and everything that requires plugins.), and perhaps to Microsoft it's a lot less justifiable to update it beyond security update.

yesimahuman 6y ago

I would be careful with Flutter’s web port. It’s going to be a pretty divergent approach in terms of web dev familiarity, bundle size, and compatibility with native web features (they had to implement copy and paste from scratch, for example). It is very similar to the approach Famous took back when. It is not looked kindly upon by many web platform advocates I know.

gitgud 6y ago
The Flutter web port is ridiculous. It circumvents the entire point of a Web page as it's literally just a canvas on the Web page. You lose all advantages that HTML and CSS gives you, links, styling, accessibility, text selection! ... It's basically a flash website... Which admittedly is okay for some applications
- _bxg1 6y ago
  It's Flash all over again, with a fresh coat of paint.
- contextfree 6y ago
  Isn't this consistent with Flutter's approach in general, though? On iOS, Android, etc., it uses its own widget toolkit and does its own rendering, it's not a wrapper over the native toolkits and renderers.
- exacube 6y ago
  You might be misinformed; according to https://medium.com/flutter/hummingbird-building-flutter-for-the-web-e687c2a023a8 https://medium.com/flutter/hummingbird-building-flutter-for-... Flutter for Web uses HTML & CSS where it can, and falls back to Canvas where it can't. Flutter for Web is still on Beta, so lets see where it lands. Today, it seems to implement some PWA practices and lazyloading to try and get some performance.
  - gitgud 6y ago
    Well that article is from 2018 and kind of overemphasises the HTML and CSS where it can. Checkout the official [1] Flutter web demos. Even the simplest [2] example renders basically every part of the UI (including text!!) within canvas elements, which is a bit crazy to me... but yes it's still Beta, so we'll see what they can improve [1] https://flutter.github.io/samples/#?platform=web https://flutter.github.io/samples/#?platform=web [2] https://flutter.github.io/samples/web/animations/#/ https://flutter.github.io/samples/web/animations/#/

aylmao 6y ago

> Recently flutter overtook react native on Google trends. How did you query this? I want to have a look, but the fact "flutter" shows data since 2004 means the terms I'm using are inflated [1]. Flutter is a dictionary word after all. [1]: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=react%20native,flutter https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=r...

joan_kode 6y ago
Don't limit your search to the US. The "dictionary word" problem is reduced in worldwide search, which shows a more convincing trend for flutter. Though I wouldn't say it has a large or clear-cut lead on React Native. https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=react%20native,flutter https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=react%20...
- aylmao 6y ago
  Oh true, good idea!

JoeOfTexas 6y ago

The community is finally at its first apex. I tried it this past weekend, and the VSCode setup was so sexy and easy to get started. I dropped React-Native in a heart beat, even losing a few weeks of work. The biggest gripe I have with React-Native is the many JS packages on npm that we can't use due to how the code is exported. It's a huge hack job, which Flutter absolutely destroyed by having everything I needed as a package that just worked. One thing I'm looking at on Flutter, is how their public packages age. If I can't use a 3 year old package on modern day Flutter, there will be some big problems coming soon.

scotth 6y ago
A three year old package would be an issue with Flutter. The move to Dart 2 was not backwards compatible. That said, there's an effort in the community to find maintainers for older packages that people find useful. If you come across something that you need, post back, or shoot me an email.

Sophistifunk 6y ago

Flutter on desktop has been "right around the corner" for about 5 years now.

drewbitt 6y ago
But Flutter didn't come out until 2017?
- Sophistifunk 6y ago
  Not for iOS and for the public, but Google had been talking about and demoing for a long time before that.
scotth 6y ago
I've been building in Flutter for desktop (macOS) for a year and a half. It's _still_ feeling early, but if you're comfortable writing a bit of native code, it pretty much just works (for single window applications — hopefully that changes soon).
- Sophistifunk 6y ago
  Writing code I'm fine with, it's coaxing other peoples' code to build that drives me nuts.

owenversteeg 6y ago

Flutter on the web is absolutely insane. For those who don't know, it basically strips away everything and wraps it in a big terrifyingly complex mess of code and renders everything in a canvas. Flutter advocates like to claim that that's "only a fallback" for when things get complex but as far as I can tell the vast majority of things (including the simplest examples from Flutter itself) force the entire thing into canvas: it's basically Flash 2.0, but worse. I seriously hope that Flutter fades. It's very dangerous in many ways. Even ignoring the huge downsides of basically having a new Flash, consider this: the massive Flutter layer is, surprise surprise, yet another Google project that is magically _significantly_ slower in Firefox. I don't mean a small difference here, I mean that on a brand new fancy flagship I tested on, Flutter in Chrome is buttery smooth and Flutter in Firefox is a miserable, laggy experience. If it gets popular, this will become yet another reason pushing people off Firefox and cementing Google's dominance of the web. Flutter is a very, very dangerous thing.

snodnipper 6y ago
Adobe Flex was my most productive client development experience over the past 20 years. I transitioned to Android _but_ there were many hideous things with that (e.g. ghastly emulator, legacy Java support etc.). My personal hope is that Flutter gains traction and the web can move beyond current web/native technology. Postscript / PDFs aren't suitable for game experiences...and to my mind web standards have been shoehorned into supporting web apps, where there is a mismatch with native technologies. I'd like to think that Flutter can help bridge that gap. This is not to say that accessibility etc. should be ignored...nor better support in Firefox...but even Brendan Eich is using Blink/V8 with Brave. Anyhow, thoughts of one.
- nojvek 6y ago
  Ahhhh Adobe Flex with MXML and ActionScript3. Before Typescript and React with JSX got popular that was the cool kids club. RIAs yo! Rich internet applications. I loved what Flex brought to the table. Too bad Adobe didn’t open source flash and let it die.
  - 6y ago