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This reminds me of Adobe's early attempts to get Flash on the iPhone. You could publish a Flash project to target iOS with their AIR runtime, which converted e

This reminds me of Adobe's early attempts to get Flash on the iPhone. You could publish a Flash project to target iOS with their AIR runtime, which converted everything into OpenGL. Tons of people made apps with it, but the performance was terrible and all the UI controls were non-native and thus had no voiceover support. This is just Google reinventing or should I say rediscovering past techniques of app building.

BenGosub 6y ago
The main value is to target multiple platforms at once. Otherwise there's no point in choosing Flutter to develop for the web.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- nexuist 6y ago
  As someone who shipped an app in Flutter on Android and iOS, there is practically 0 code re-usability between web and mobile. Regardless of platform, mobile apps feel the same - they both have navbars, tab bars, lists and table views, etc. Even if I could use an iOS navbar on web, it would look so out of place it's not worth considering. Okay, so you can't reuse UI components, surely you can reuse the Dart code that makes up the guts of the webapp? And, sure, you could, but why would you when you can spend maybe 10 minutes to translate it to native JS (the two languages are practically identical) and ship it without the Flutter Web dependency? I actually feel like it'd be easier for me to convert some of my Flutter components into React ones, than to try and learn Flutter Web and set up its whole toolchain. I think it's a cool idea, but it's not meant for widespread use (speculation): it's meant specifically for Google's Fuchsia, where they are probably planning on shipping Web applications pretending to be native desktop apps along with the full Chrome experience much like they did for Chromebook.
dathinab 6y ago
I don't think so. A major difference is that as far as I can tell flutter is long term meant to be the main way to write native Android apps. Flutter on web has this kind of problem due to how they handle text differently then a HTML does and HTML provides no way to customize it to the way they need it. Flutter on Android, iOs, Linux, etc. won't have this problem. Most modern UI's render with a graphics API like OpenGl (ES), Firefox does so for HTML.
- MrDresden 6y ago
  Flutter has not been designated as the long term means of writing Android applications. Given that the underlying Android system heavily relies on the JVM, the heavy emphasis on Kotlin support and the 3rd party nature of Flutter (you need to build bridges to use it) it is simply yet another x-platform tool to build mobile applications.
  - dathinab 6y ago
    > 3rd party nature of Flutter Currently yes, but I believe long term this will change.
    - MrDresden 6y ago
      It could become the go to way in the future. Google is definitely gauging the enthusiasm of their developer base to see where they move to. It is what happened with Kotlin in the first place. And they aren't putting all of their eggs in the same basket as Jetpack Compose is now in active development and will, once ready, rival SwiftUI in functionality and power. I hope there will be flexibility and support for both in the future. Flutter has its positives and negatives as everything else. Same can be said about native development.
somishere 6y ago
Just reminds me of flash in general. It was effectively a reliable cross-browser 'vector canvas' that was a dream for developers but a completely inaccessible, closed system to everyone else. No doubt they will get there with performance on flutter, but the decade-old concerns per flash's demise will be harder to address.

BenGosub 6y ago

The main value is to target multiple platforms at once. Otherwise there's no point in choosing Flutter to develop for the web.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
nexuist 6y ago
As someone who shipped an app in Flutter on Android and iOS, there is practically 0 code re-usability between web and mobile. Regardless of platform, mobile apps feel the same - they both have navbars, tab bars, lists and table views, etc. Even if I could use an iOS navbar on web, it would look so out of place it's not worth considering. Okay, so you can't reuse UI components, surely you can reuse the Dart code that makes up the guts of the webapp? And, sure, you could, but why would you when you can spend maybe 10 minutes to translate it to native JS (the two languages are practically identical) and ship it without the Flutter Web dependency? I actually feel like it'd be easier for me to convert some of my Flutter components into React ones, than to try and learn Flutter Web and set up its whole toolchain. I think it's a cool idea, but it's not meant for widespread use (speculation): it's meant specifically for Google's Fuchsia, where they are probably planning on shipping Web applications pretending to be native desktop apps along with the full Chrome experience much like they did for Chromebook.

dathinab 6y ago

I don't think so. A major difference is that as far as I can tell flutter is long term meant to be the main way to write native Android apps. Flutter on web has this kind of problem due to how they handle text differently then a HTML does and HTML provides no way to customize it to the way they need it. Flutter on Android, iOs, Linux, etc. won't have this problem. Most modern UI's render with a graphics API like OpenGl (ES), Firefox does so for HTML.

MrDresden 6y ago
Flutter has not been designated as the long term means of writing Android applications. Given that the underlying Android system heavily relies on the JVM, the heavy emphasis on Kotlin support and the 3rd party nature of Flutter (you need to build bridges to use it) it is simply yet another x-platform tool to build mobile applications.
- dathinab 6y ago
  > 3rd party nature of Flutter Currently yes, but I believe long term this will change.
  - MrDresden 6y ago
    It could become the go to way in the future. Google is definitely gauging the enthusiasm of their developer base to see where they move to. It is what happened with Kotlin in the first place. And they aren't putting all of their eggs in the same basket as Jetpack Compose is now in active development and will, once ready, rival SwiftUI in functionality and power. I hope there will be flexibility and support for both in the future. Flutter has its positives and negatives as everything else. Same can be said about native development.

somishere 6y ago

Just reminds me of flash in general. It was effectively a reliable cross-browser 'vector canvas' that was a dream for developers but a completely inaccessible, closed system to everyone else. No doubt they will get there with performance on flutter, but the decade-old concerns per flash's demise will be harder to address.