Flutter is probably meant to be the native toolkit of a platform. I don’t think there is anything wrong with code-once toolkits that don’t use native widgets if

Flutter is probably meant to be the native toolkit of a platform. I don’t think there is anything wrong with code-once toolkits that don’t use native widgets if they spend the effort to be accessible and have good UX. I’m personally falling into the belief that we’ve fooled ourselves regarding UI. That one single UI library could actually be the ideal choice for every possible app, and that we just need to keep trying until the absolute perfect set of tradeoffs appears. I think this is enticing because UI is very hard and full of problems you would have to solve over and over if you had multiple UI frameworks, whereas these things could be amortized if there were less. I don’t think so. I do think the UI ecosystem, as it slows down, could become more modular and share more core components. I expect to see “base” rendering libraries, like Skia or Pathfinder, powering next generation UIs, and hopefully someone will also make a cross-platform library to provide accessibility and IME primitives for Windows TSF/macOS/etc. I think smaller bits like that can clearly be minmax’d to ideal conditions for given use cases. But if you were hoping for a future of “just use the native toolkit!” I think it’s not likely, at least not until software slows down a lot more. Even then, lowest common denominator libraries like wxWidgets often end up being disliked by users and developers alike, due to the compromises needed for them to accomplish their goals. I’ll admit the story has gotten better with React Native and its success on mobile, but even that is not a perfect story: performance on Android was apparently not good enough for Discord, which may in fact be a pretty good signal for why something like Flutter is a good idea anyways: it can mature over time on existing platforms and then possibly even become the first class toolkit for something. I do agree that most developers should prefer native over vanity, but it’s a false dichotomy, as there are plenty of valid reasons to not do native. No more is this clear than Windows, where virtually nobody does “native” anymore. (It can still be OK, but it’s not great. Having true HWNDs for every component is a great way to have things flicker whenever you delete/create new widgets.)