10 ms·
FlutterFlow: Low-code Flutter apps
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 5y agoI am still looking for the equivalent of Visual Basic for making modern Web and mobile apps. It is exciting that we might finally be getting there!
- jordanab 5y agoASP.NET Web Forms + Telerik components always came really close for me for web apps. And to lesser extend Xamarin Forms for mobile as well.
- pavlov 5y agoThere's React Studio which is free and quite complete, although has some learning curve: https://reactstudio.com https://reactstudio.com
- pjmlp 5y agoVB is 30 years old this year and we still need to re-invent for the Web, sadly. However there is stuff like OutSystems or Oracle Apex. By the way Xojo does support WebAssembly.
- axaxs 5y agoSame here. VB was widely dogged, perhaps rightly so. But I've never been near as fast or productive when making a functional GUI. It's sad that fell out of favor.
- intrasight 5y agoI'm still looking for the equivalent of DataViews (leading GUI builder in 1998) for modern apps. I'm serious too.
- readonthegoapp 5y agoThe closest-ish i've come is messing with Anvil. not affiliated, but i do go back every 3 months to find out again that the $50/mo buy-in is too high for my liking. https://anvil.works/ https://anvil.works/
- meredydd 5y agoThe framework is open source, so if you don't want to pay, you can self host! You can use the dev environment for free, then deploy on your own hardware: https://anvil.works/open-source https://anvil.works/open-source (Founder here, confirming that this is a Supported Use Case :-P)
- machello13 5y agoThe low-codeness is certainly impressive. Judging from the sample app though, Flutter still has a long way to go in terms of native look-and-feel (on iOS at least).
- gman83 5y agoIsn't it using Material Design?
- machello13 5y agoNative iOS apps that use material design don't feel sluggish or laggy.
- ladyanita22 5y agoThe app looks good on an iPhone.
- machello13 5y agoIt looks fine, depending on your taste anyway, but there's noticeable scrolling lag and animations are stuttery the first time they play. Feels sluggish in general.
- sgt 5y agoI would consider Flutter apps that have been compiled to ARM and runs on an iPhone natively (basically just using a canvas to draw pixels on) is very fast. However Flutter web is not very fast, but it's getting there.
- jamil7 5y agoThere are currently some performance issues on iOS, this being the most well known https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/76180 https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/76180
- primitivesuave 5y agoI'm genuinely curious how easy no-code app development has to become in order to be adopted at scale in the software industry. Right now I'm still getting the sense that most companies prefer to hire a dedicated app development team and have full control over the architecture.
- sgt 5y agoYes, you generally always run into something that the company building your low code tools will need to cater for or fix for you somehow. It gives you so much grief that you might as well write and own your tools.
- swyx 5y agoits not a binary.. first of all there are tons of people who have software needs who just dont have that option. Whats the solution, hire you? you're expensive, and you have your own backlog to deal with. *they are bottlenecked by you*. second of all flutterflow (and other code-exporting builders like webflow) generates code you can take over, so it can even be helpful to people who could code it themselves, all it has to do is save some substantial time, which as a UI builder myself a WYSIWYG tool always does.
- fakedang 5y agoThis. I tried out Flutter Flow a few days back. I was able to do a ton of boring design work very productively, as well as the Firebase integration gamut, but I can't see myself coding app logic with the existing setup.
- primitivesuave 5y agoAwesome, thank you for this insight! Does it generate quality code?
- fakedang 5y ago
- sgt 5y agoI checked it out - but I think most developers would be more comfortable writing Dart code to develop Flutter code. I can see that something like FlutterFlow is useful if you need snippets to e.g. get a stylized layout with little effort. Kind of like a quick way of getting the look you want, and then pasting it back into Android Studio. Even then I'd change and improve the code - I see that the styles are a bit "hard coded" with a variety of fonts I have never seen the need to use. The UI is a bit laggy on Safari.
- GeneralTspoon 5y agoOf course the UI is laggy - the web app is built with Flutter! ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- offtop5 5y agoI was very interested up until I saw the pricing. $70 a month is way too much. A big issue here is just how easy flutter is, I'd rather invest 20 hours once to build it using Dart, then to pay $800 a year.
- abelsm 5y agoFlutterFlow cofounder here. Thanks for your input on our pricing. It's more than knowing how to code, we've been building with Flutter for a while now, but there's still no way we could have coded FlutterMet in under an hour. It would take us 10 hrs+ to manually do that. But it took <1 hour in FlutterFlow. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TXsjnd_4SBo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TXsjnd_4SBo Also, we allow you to push the generated code to your Github repository, so you don't have to keep paying us once you build your app. :)
- offtop5 5y agoAnyway you can come down to maybe 30$. Anything over $50 becomes a line item in my budget, I can't justify spending $50 a month in the hobbyist space. It's a great idea, I just don't think I can really afford it.
- abelsm 5y agoWe have a $30/mo plan. :)
- Escapado 5y agoTo be honest this is the best selling point in my opinion. It's a great tool for MVP scenarios and especially in business contexts that price tag is entire negligible compared to the hourly rate of most engineers! So a single hour saved will already make up for it.
- notsureaboutpg 5y agoTo get a workable, usable prototype out the door and even save one day is well worth the monthly price you quoted
- jrm4 5y agoAt the risk of being a grump, is this yet another thing that could probably be as good as HyperCard, but won't because monetizing these sort of heavily creative things tends not to work?
- canadianfella 5y agoWhat part is the grumpy part?
- sz4kerto 5y agoI've tried it out, registered for the premium to check out the details. Biggest problem: querying Firebase is problematic. I can bind a collection to a ListView, but in many cases I'd like to map a field to something. For example I have a list of "purchases" and I'd like to map the "buyerId" to an email address. This can't be done, and the generated code is hard to adapt to this kind of use case. And therein lies the complexity to be honest. I think it'd worth $30 just as a designer. But you have to be able to code.
- abelsm 5y agoThanks so much for sharing feedback! In this scenario, your collection is "purchases" and there's a "buyerId" field in a purchase document? And you want to get the email from buyerId? If buyerId is a uid, you can do another query to get the user document from uid and get the email address from that. I may be misunderstanding the question.
- fredgrott 5y agoConsidering one has to hand write an ios approach and a material design one unless they support the Flutter Platform widgets plugins most of your would probably need to avoid this. My bias, I am not the project lead on flutter Platform widgets but I am one of the lower end contributors.
- mkw5053 5y agoIs it possible to write completely custom components?
- abelsm 5y agoWe don't support editing code in FlutterFlow atm. But this is something we want to enable. What we see a lot of our users do now is push to Github (flutterflow branch), and merge in to their main branch where they have their custom logic.
- asgreaves 5y agoFlutterFlow cofounder here! We thought the HN crowd would want to see the generated code for FlutterMet, so here it is: https://github.com/FlutterFlow/FlutterMetSample/tree/flutterflow https://github.com/FlutterFlow/FlutterMetSample/tree/flutter... We try to generate clean Flutter code that follows best practices – we have a long way to go, but we couldn't be more excited. Edit: Also, here's the video of us building it (in just under an hour): https://youtu.be/TXsjnd_4SBo https://youtu.be/TXsjnd_4SBo
- salimmadjd 5y agoIt’ll be great if you had an “about us” section there so I could easily see who is behind it, instead having to google it. Your backgrounds [1] seem very solid so why not showcase it? [1] https://www.linkedin.com/in/asgreaves https://www.linkedin.com/in/asgreaves
- swyx 5y agocongrats on launch! just wondering since you're here - what is the roadmap now that you're launched and what key hires are you looking to make? am always interested in how companies transition from a deep build phase into a build-and-market-what-you've-already-built phase.
- abelsm 5y agothanks! we have some exciting features coming up. - deploy to app stores from FlutterFlow, via Codemagic - search functionality, via Algolia - several widgets (map/chat/pop-ups/bottom sheet) in terms of our team, we're looking to bring on a community manager and a content strategist.
- swyx 5y agooh man, deploy to app store would be magical. looking forward to that! if you'd like to chat with me on content strategy, you have my email :)
- treyhuffine 5y agoLove the product, this is incredible! - Is it possible to set an API request header to include the Firebase ID token? - Are you able to embed a webview on a page? - Is there a pattern yet for in-app payments?
- 01walid 5y agoCan it talk to a GraphQL backend ?
- anatolinicolae 5y agoYou can make it to. https://pub.dev/packages/graphql https://pub.dev/packages/graphql
- abelsm 5y agoIt's on our list.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- kiawe_fire 5y agoInitially this looks really nice - very much the kind of tooling I’ve thought about for Flutter since I started using it. This product aside, though, I find it funny how the whole “reactive widget tree that gets rebuilt when data changes” and “everything is just nested objects with properties, no XML needed” trend felt like “backlash” against the UI Builders, Visual Basics, and Glades. And yet now we’re building visual tools to control all the nested reactive component frameworks very much in that same vein.
- InfiniteRand 5y agoI think neither paradigm is invalid and neither is a clear winner so fashion drifts back and forth
- iddan 5y agoI think UI builders are considered as good tools, it’s the XML that is “not needed”
- tpmx 5y agoI wish you success. I really like Dart and the concept of Flutter. However: I'm still waiting for a 100% Flutter-based iOS app published in the app store that I can try to make sure that it does not have any apparent jank. Yes, I know that Flutter 2.2 which launched a few days ago included tools designed to fight some of the sources of jank (e.g. bundling precompiled shaders) but after such a long time of promises from the Flutter team I just want to see a 100% flutter app hitting a solid 60 fps on my own phone, for real.
- judge2020 5y agoI think google pay[0] is entirely flutter[1] (how much is actually flutter is unknown). It does seem pretty slow, actually - it’s like it only plays every third frame when animating switching between the app’s tabs. 0: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/google-pay-save-pay-manage/id1193357041 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/google-pay-save-pay-manage/id1... 1: https://developers.googleblog.com/2020/09/google-pay-picks-flutter-to-drive-its.html https://developers.googleblog.com/2020/09/google-pay-picks-f...
- tpmx 5y agoHere's a subthread about Flutter jank/performance from the 2.0 release back in March: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26333213 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26333213 Back then at least one of the "featured" apps had key screens written in e.g. ObjC. Google Pay was also discussed.
- novok 5y agoMy current idea of how to do a non-javascript multi-platform app strategy: Apple SwiftUI for iOS & macOS. Flutter for Android, Windows, Linux and possibly a web client.
- tpmx 5y agoThat seems like a smart and pragmatic strategy. Thanks for sharing that idea!
- 5y ago
- kumarvvr 5y agoI am conflicted about Flutter. Is it worth learning, over, say Angular (for web) or Xamarin (for mobile and cross platform stuff)? Flutter for web was just released after a long time in beta stage. It looks like a good language and framework, but I don't see many options for customization. And frankly, the UI composition syntax is tasteless, in my view (Compared to React, which is awesome, or Angular, which is verbose and complex but still understandable)
- cutler 5y agoSeconded. Flutter widget trees make JS callback hell look elegant.
- tluyben2 5y ago> Xamarin (for mobile and cross platform stuff)? As a long term (since the first dev releases of MonoTouch) dev who now uses Flutter, I would almost hysterically scream yes. We still maintain a lot of Xamarin projects: it is always a bit of a self-peptalk to get started after coming out of Flutter.
- fakedang 5y agoFlutter is much much better than Xamarin imo. And imo, it has been far easier for many folks to pick up Flutter over ReactNative, especially those coming from JS backgrounds. That being said, the jank issues with Flutter on iOS make it a showstopper. And web and Windows Flutter is like in alpha.
- halfmatthalfcat 5y ago> And imo, it has been far easier for many folks to pick up Flutter over ReactNative, especially those coming from JS backgrounds. Would love more context around this statement because I would have assumed the exact opposite, especially when you have to use a completely different language.
- fakedang 5y agoOops, my bad. Those NOT coming from JS backgrounds.
- OliverGilan 5y agoIn theory, I love the idea of web builders such as this. I think creating simple CRUD apps is still surprisingly difficult but this tool seems to strike the right balance between complexity and simplicity. At least from the marketing it appears that way. I look forward to playing around with this and I hope for continued integration with as many tools as possible.
- bkovacev 5y agoDoes this only support Firebase for now? Are there plans to support "regular" APIs for both auth and querying?
- xg15 5y ago> Check out an app, FlutterMet, that we built in under an hour! That's great, but how quickly can you: - get new developers up to speed in an existing product? - add a new feature to an existing product? - debug a non-trivial issue?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Gys 5y agoDoes it support push notifications?