11 ms·

Google releases Flutter 3.7, teases future of app development framework

43 points by gman83 4y ago

tylerag 4y ago
Google’s Fuchsia OS was one of the hardest hit by last week’s layoffs https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34515277 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34515277
- brnt 4y ago
  There was one device using it. Is there going to be more, or is this the answer to that question?
matchbok 4y ago
Flutter just needs to close up shop - I'm surprised it's still going after the layoffs. The value of a cross-platform SDK just doesn't make sense anymore. If you are a small startup, going iOS only is feasible. If you are a huge company, you'll need native devs anyway, so why add a Google dependency? Makes no sense.
- BaculumMeumEst 4y ago
  i recall speculation that they planned to deprecate or replace the android sdk with flutter
  - saurik 4y ago
    That would require someone actually having the power to be able to make such a decision, but Google internally seems to just end up with squabbling camps that try to defend their turf.
- spenster 4y ago
  > The value of a cross-platform SDK just doesn't make sense anymore. It makes perfect sense to the market. Flutter in fact fills a niche that does pay off in many use cases. Is it the perfect fit for everything? No, but for many small dev shops "going iOS only" is not feasible at all, since they need market penetration across platforms; and going native for two platforms is not practical since they don't have the dev resources.
- Aulig 4y ago
  Going iOS only is not feasible at all outside of the US, where iOS has a much smaller market share than their 55% in the US.
- thewizardofaus 4y ago
  I am sole founder of a bootstrapped hardware startup. My main competitor is iOS only. As I'm the only developer Flutter allowed me to create both iOS and Android apps simultaneously (with some tweaking). My customer base is approximately 80% iOS / 20% Android.
  - BoorishBears 4y ago
    You just made their case. I've worked on some of the top apps in both the Play Store and the App Store in the past, and it's a well known fact: Android doesn't pay. No it doesn't literally pay $0, but while you can support Android for a ton of reasons, none of them should ever be: "We expect Android to directly pull its fair weight in terms of revenue". It might enable you to engage customers in other channels for example, like with your hardware product, but Android itself, as in IAPs and ads, will rarely ever catch up with iOS. - 20% of your base being on Android and in exchange you've locked yourself out of a massive amount of development resources, end up building a ton on 3rd party components that bridge the least common denominator problem, spent a non-zero amount of engineering effort on a non-native experience for your users, you'll lag on platform improvements users get excited about... It's just not a good deal unless you're in a case where an outside factor bridges the gap. Most Flutter projects won't have a hardware product for that.
    - rhaway84773 4y ago
      You’re right. Why should we as developers target plebes who can’t afford to buy $1000 dollar devices and opt for platforms that start at a fraction of that, ie the majority of the world. F’ing commoners.
      - BoorishBears 4y ago
        Apple makes what is easily the best value of any mobile device with the SE line, and I already called out that you can support Android for reasons other than raw profit. Maybe save the childlike angst for when you have an actual point.
      - 4y ago
- thefounder 4y ago
  I assume you think the same about electron
- gman83 4y ago
  There's a reason they held their conference in Kenya. Flutter is very popular in Africa & Asia. For American & maybe European startups iOS only is feasible, everywhere else not so much.
- realusername 4y ago
  Without Flutter that's the opposite, only the Android app would have existed and I would have gave up on iOS. Flutter is the only reason the iOS app exists at all. I'm in a market where 95%+ of users are on Android and the lower quality of the dev ecosystem on Apple platforms isn't exactly helping.
- prennert 4y ago
  We did use flutter to build something like a companion app for our B2B product targeted at enterprises. One dev supported Android and iOS and performance was good (no battery issues, etc for an app that was mostly always running). It was a blessing that we chose a cross platform approach as our users did not decide which the devices they use, corporate does. And it can change its mind. I do get the fear of the Google dependency, though. I did feel lucky that support did not end before we were done with it.
bsaul 4y ago
i don't get the comments : the article says that flutter is alive and thriving, yet the comments speak of the tech as something soon to be dead.
- urbandw311er 4y ago
  Then the truth is probably somewhere in between.
jaredcwhite 4y ago
Is Flutter interesting as a way to create a cross iOS/Android app? I don't know, maybe. But I do know their web experience is atrocious. Terrible performance, no standard OS-level ergonomics, essentially Flash all over again with a single <canvas> tag. Why would anyone ever sign off on shipping something with this on the web except maybe some weird enterprise-y internal app?
- gman83 4y ago
  I use Rive - https://rive.app/ https://rive.app/ - which is built in Flutter and it works well on the web.
- satvikpendem 4y ago
  It works great for apps, especially ones with lots of interactive or graphics heavy elements. Treat it like Flash, yes, you wouldn't make a game out of DOM interactions. You could, but most people used something like Flash to do so.
fnfjfk 4y ago
Reinventing UI frameworks from absolute scratch is always going to be janky and playing catch-up, on every platform. At least RN uses normal UIKit controls on iOS that work and feel like normal.
- kitsunesoba 4y ago
  The problem I see with cross platform UI frameworks, at least on desktop, is that often they don’t come with a full compliment of widgets with the dev being told they’re on their own for surprisingly basic things. A lot of newer UI frameworks have nothing resembling a tableview with sort and columns/rows that can be rearranged with drag and drop for example, which is insane to me. These things have been standard in desktop OS UI frameworks for ages. This kills my motivation when trying these frameworks out. I don’t want to be hunting down some half baked third party dependencies for various widgets or rolling my own, I want to be writing application code.
- zigzag312 4y ago
  > Reinventing UI frameworks from absolute scratch is always going to be janky and playing catch-up, on every platform. Why? UI framework build from absolute scratch can be build using same low level APIs as platform's native UI framework. Performance depends on framework's architecture and quality of the implementation. RN can only be worse or equal as the underlying native UI framework. UI framework build from scratch can be worse, equal or better.
- mike_hearn 4y ago
  Perhaps, but that didn't stop web apps!
rektide 4y ago
The Flutter 3.7 article on The Register[1] had great quotes throughout. Which often sent cold shivers down my spine. > "Historically, people built for the web using the Document Object Model and HTML," explained Sneath. "And that was kind of the only way to build web apps. Now, over the last couple of years, between Canvas and WebAssembly, we've got these new technologies that enable a different class of web app experience. And so Flutter is unapologetically aiming at that next-generation class." So, you're saying we will abandon DOM and HTML & use Canvas to push pixels in people's faces? That... does not sound very web like to me. The "different class" that Flutter is "unapologetic" about sounds like VNC or Flash; a completely controlled, locked down, isolated little fief nestled inside the web page. Again, like Flash. > "We're aiming at this next class of apps that look very much like the kinds of apps that Flutter is designed to solve – high graphical fidelity, offering pixel level of control over apps, having a canvas where you can draw and manage every part of the environment yourself." Not on Flutters priority list/not supported after the Flutter revolution: user-agency, web extensions, view-source, malleability, standards, interoperability, support from existing accessibility tools. I actually think Flutter is an interesting set of tech & am glad to see another entrant to building apps. But every-time they open their mouth, it's to badmouth & insult the web, to highlight how their game plan to win is by becoming evil & ruining interoperability & standards as hard & fast as they can. The priority system here seems deranged & anti-human to me; 'we take the only successful standards based hyper-medium on the planet, and we reduce it to a Canvas renderer that shoves pixels in your face, with 100% control from Google over what those pixels are and how they work.' We forfeit all user control, we give up all ability to read & parse & modify each other's web content. And for what? "Pixel perfect level of control?" "High graphical fidelity"? "Draw and manage every part of the environment yourself?" Bro, your app is not that important. There's other kinds of delight; I think users are waking up to how shallow & controlled & manipulative apps are, and doubling down on "we just need slicker design systems to really really delight our users" (and capture them for good!) is a limited game. This is a nightmare, one where only a very very few players have control over the technological environment, one where humanity has no say, no stake, no control. What Flutter proposes is the most polarizing end of what Ursala Franklin talks about in technological society, where who can build the environment, who has say, how things form is extremely narrowly controlled. It talks to utterly prescriptivist ends where humankind merely receives technology as it is built from the corporation, and that end is forever & always enough (& all that is possible). The web, to me, has been defined & shaped by being more, by being better, by having a deeper level of engagement, owing to a malleable & open platform that users participate in, every time we install an extension, every time we run a user style sheet; a holism. When we invited the "intertwingularity" back in the Cluetrain Manifesto days, there was a value system trying to come out, that humanity is empowered when systems are open & out there & when we can explore what is possible. I welcome technological innovation, but the wanton disregard & active badmouthing the Flutter spokespeople have for malleable systems, for standards & interoperation, their willingness to inflate their own importance by insulting & denigrating web extensions, user agency: it's an incredibly poor look for their would be new Flash project, for their attempt to make an impervious, inaccessible, unmodifiable prison of control within the web & atop native. I'd like to see a tone shift, where they talk about how they'll better work with the web, rather than usurp it's bones to build a new monstrous titan of app-dev. Thankfully this 3.7 release actually has some perhaps possible good news, that maybe/perhaps Flutter can be intermixed somewhat with HTML/DOM on the page. The Register suggests perhaps Flutter's HTML/DOM mode and it's CanvasKit pixel-blaster mode can perhaps interoperate some. It's hard to tell right now how well Flutter might possibly be able to play within the web. But it's hard to recognize even the possibility- to see that the Flutter team really has any empathy what-so-ever for the web & web standards- when their rhetoric so proudly champions things that seem actively bad for the user, when so much of the work still looks like source-free, unmodifiable islands of Flash on the page; it wasn't good then, & it's still harmful now, & it's hard to appreciate the potential gain when it so lopsidedly enhances corporate control. But at least there is some evidence that Flutter is trying to do a little more interweaving than before... although again, it's hard to recognize that when the current rhetoric from the team is so mono-focused on their graphical capabilities above all. [1] https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/25/flutter_3_7/ https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/25/flutter_3_7/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34519279 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34519279 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ursula_Franklin#Technological_society https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ursula_Franklin#Technological_...
mike_hearn 4y ago
I keep hearing good things about Flutter, it's seems like a bit of a quiet hit. We've added support for Flutter Desktop in the next release of Hydraulic Conveyor so it'll get a lot easier to distribute Flutter apps outside the browser soon. There's a demo of how to package Flutter apps built using Github Actions here: https://github.com/hydraulic-software/flutter-demo/ https://github.com/hydraulic-software/flutter-demo/ (see the conveyor.conf file, it's a normal Flutter Desktop app other than that). That won't work with the current release but we should get the next one out this week or next. This should be great for people who want to bring their cross-platform mobile app to laptops and other form factors without exploding costs by needing to write/maintain an HTML version too. That duplication really isn't ideal for a lot of reasons e.g. some users will end up trying to use the web version from mobile so you end up with actually 4x frontend dev costs (iOS, Android, web desktop, web mobile) and for smaller projects it's just hard to justify. Traditionally desktop deployment was a huge pain and that pushes people towards trying to use Chrome for everything, because it handles updates and uploading a few files to a web server is easy. With Conveyor and easily available multi-platform CI for compiles that's fixed now, the hardest part is buying the signing certificates which is just a bit of paperwork and money. The problem with trying to do everything with WebAssembly and canvas is that you're paying a big perf hit and due to cache partitioning you can't really reduce the size hit of an alternative language and graphics stack by amortizing it across different sites like was once possible. And browsers aren't interested in making it easy for people to do that, they want to control the whole experience, so there's lots of paper cuts and apps written with Flutter are ultimately going to be best experienced outside the browser. [1] https://hydraulic.software/ https://hydraulic.software/

43 points by gman83 4y ago

Google’s Fuchsia OS was one of the hardest hit by last week’s layoffs https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34515277 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34515277

brnt 4y ago
There was one device using it. Is there going to be more, or is this the answer to that question?

matchbok 4y ago

Flutter just needs to close up shop - I'm surprised it's still going after the layoffs. The value of a cross-platform SDK just doesn't make sense anymore. If you are a small startup, going iOS only is feasible. If you are a huge company, you'll need native devs anyway, so why add a Google dependency? Makes no sense.

BaculumMeumEst 4y ago
i recall speculation that they planned to deprecate or replace the android sdk with flutter
- saurik 4y ago
  That would require someone actually having the power to be able to make such a decision, but Google internally seems to just end up with squabbling camps that try to defend their turf.
spenster 4y ago
> The value of a cross-platform SDK just doesn't make sense anymore. It makes perfect sense to the market. Flutter in fact fills a niche that does pay off in many use cases. Is it the perfect fit for everything? No, but for many small dev shops "going iOS only" is not feasible at all, since they need market penetration across platforms; and going native for two platforms is not practical since they don't have the dev resources.
Aulig 4y ago
Going iOS only is not feasible at all outside of the US, where iOS has a much smaller market share than their 55% in the US.
thewizardofaus 4y ago
I am sole founder of a bootstrapped hardware startup. My main competitor is iOS only. As I'm the only developer Flutter allowed me to create both iOS and Android apps simultaneously (with some tweaking). My customer base is approximately 80% iOS / 20% Android.
- BoorishBears 4y ago
  You just made their case. I've worked on some of the top apps in both the Play Store and the App Store in the past, and it's a well known fact: Android doesn't pay. No it doesn't literally pay $0, but while you can support Android for a ton of reasons, none of them should ever be: "We expect Android to directly pull its fair weight in terms of revenue". It might enable you to engage customers in other channels for example, like with your hardware product, but Android itself, as in IAPs and ads, will rarely ever catch up with iOS. - 20% of your base being on Android and in exchange you've locked yourself out of a massive amount of development resources, end up building a ton on 3rd party components that bridge the least common denominator problem, spent a non-zero amount of engineering effort on a non-native experience for your users, you'll lag on platform improvements users get excited about... It's just not a good deal unless you're in a case where an outside factor bridges the gap. Most Flutter projects won't have a hardware product for that.
  - rhaway84773 4y ago
    You’re right. Why should we as developers target plebes who can’t afford to buy $1000 dollar devices and opt for platforms that start at a fraction of that, ie the majority of the world. F’ing commoners.
    - BoorishBears 4y ago
      Apple makes what is easily the best value of any mobile device with the SE line, and I already called out that you can support Android for reasons other than raw profit. Maybe save the childlike angst for when you have an actual point.
    - 4y ago
thefounder 4y ago
I assume you think the same about electron
gman83 4y ago
There's a reason they held their conference in Kenya. Flutter is very popular in Africa & Asia. For American & maybe European startups iOS only is feasible, everywhere else not so much.
realusername 4y ago
Without Flutter that's the opposite, only the Android app would have existed and I would have gave up on iOS. Flutter is the only reason the iOS app exists at all. I'm in a market where 95%+ of users are on Android and the lower quality of the dev ecosystem on Apple platforms isn't exactly helping.
prennert 4y ago
We did use flutter to build something like a companion app for our B2B product targeted at enterprises. One dev supported Android and iOS and performance was good (no battery issues, etc for an app that was mostly always running). It was a blessing that we chose a cross platform approach as our users did not decide which the devices they use, corporate does. And it can change its mind. I do get the fear of the Google dependency, though. I did feel lucky that support did not end before we were done with it.

bsaul 4y ago

i don't get the comments : the article says that flutter is alive and thriving, yet the comments speak of the tech as something soon to be dead.

urbandw311er 4y ago
Then the truth is probably somewhere in between.

jaredcwhite 4y ago

Is Flutter interesting as a way to create a cross iOS/Android app? I don't know, maybe. But I do know their web experience is atrocious. Terrible performance, no standard OS-level ergonomics, essentially Flash all over again with a single <canvas> tag. Why would anyone ever sign off on shipping something with this on the web except maybe some weird enterprise-y internal app?

gman83 4y ago
I use Rive - https://rive.app/ https://rive.app/ - which is built in Flutter and it works well on the web.
satvikpendem 4y ago
It works great for apps, especially ones with lots of interactive or graphics heavy elements. Treat it like Flash, yes, you wouldn't make a game out of DOM interactions. You could, but most people used something like Flash to do so.

fnfjfk 4y ago

Reinventing UI frameworks from absolute scratch is always going to be janky and playing catch-up, on every platform. At least RN uses normal UIKit controls on iOS that work and feel like normal.

kitsunesoba 4y ago
The problem I see with cross platform UI frameworks, at least on desktop, is that often they don’t come with a full compliment of widgets with the dev being told they’re on their own for surprisingly basic things. A lot of newer UI frameworks have nothing resembling a tableview with sort and columns/rows that can be rearranged with drag and drop for example, which is insane to me. These things have been standard in desktop OS UI frameworks for ages. This kills my motivation when trying these frameworks out. I don’t want to be hunting down some half baked third party dependencies for various widgets or rolling my own, I want to be writing application code.
zigzag312 4y ago
> Reinventing UI frameworks from absolute scratch is always going to be janky and playing catch-up, on every platform. Why? UI framework build from absolute scratch can be build using same low level APIs as platform's native UI framework. Performance depends on framework's architecture and quality of the implementation. RN can only be worse or equal as the underlying native UI framework. UI framework build from scratch can be worse, equal or better.
mike_hearn 4y ago
Perhaps, but that didn't stop web apps!

rektide 4y ago

The Flutter 3.7 article on The Register[1] had great quotes throughout. Which often sent cold shivers down my spine. > "Historically, people built for the web using the Document Object Model and HTML," explained Sneath. "And that was kind of the only way to build web apps. Now, over the last couple of years, between Canvas and WebAssembly, we've got these new technologies that enable a different class of web app experience. And so Flutter is unapologetically aiming at that next-generation class." So, you're saying we will abandon DOM and HTML & use Canvas to push pixels in people's faces? That... does not sound very web like to me. The "different class" that Flutter is "unapologetic" about sounds like VNC or Flash; a completely controlled, locked down, isolated little fief nestled inside the web page. Again, like Flash. > "We're aiming at this next class of apps that look very much like the kinds of apps that Flutter is designed to solve – high graphical fidelity, offering pixel level of control over apps, having a canvas where you can draw and manage every part of the environment yourself." Not on Flutters priority list/not supported after the Flutter revolution: user-agency, web extensions, view-source, malleability, standards, interoperability, support from existing accessibility tools. I actually think Flutter is an interesting set of tech & am glad to see another entrant to building apps. But every-time they open their mouth, it's to badmouth & insult the web, to highlight how their game plan to win is by becoming evil & ruining interoperability & standards as hard & fast as they can. The priority system here seems deranged & anti-human to me; 'we take the only successful standards based hyper-medium on the planet, and we reduce it to a Canvas renderer that shoves pixels in your face, with 100% control from Google over what those pixels are and how they work.' We forfeit all user control, we give up all ability to read & parse & modify each other's web content. And for what? "Pixel perfect level of control?" "High graphical fidelity"? "Draw and manage every part of the environment yourself?" Bro, your app is not that important. There's other kinds of delight; I think users are waking up to how shallow & controlled & manipulative apps are, and doubling down on "we just need slicker design systems to really really delight our users" (and capture them for good!) is a limited game. This is a nightmare, one where only a very very few players have control over the technological environment, one where humanity has no say, no stake, no control. What Flutter proposes is the most polarizing end of what Ursala Franklin talks about in technological society, where who can build the environment, who has say, how things form is extremely narrowly controlled. It talks to utterly prescriptivist ends where humankind merely receives technology as it is built from the corporation, and that end is forever & always enough (& all that is possible). The web, to me, has been defined & shaped by being more, by being better, by having a deeper level of engagement, owing to a malleable & open platform that users participate in, every time we install an extension, every time we run a user style sheet; a holism. When we invited the "intertwingularity" back in the Cluetrain Manifesto days, there was a value system trying to come out, that humanity is empowered when systems are open & out there & when we can explore what is possible. I welcome technological innovation, but the wanton disregard & active badmouthing the Flutter spokespeople have for malleable systems, for standards & interoperation, their willingness to inflate their own importance by insulting & denigrating web extensions, user agency: it's an incredibly poor look for their would be new Flash project, for their attempt to make an impervious, inaccessible, unmodifiable prison of control within the web & atop native. I'd like to see a tone shift, where they talk about how they'll better work with the web, rather than usurp it's bones to build a new monstrous titan of app-dev. Thankfully this 3.7 release actually has some perhaps possible good news, that maybe/perhaps Flutter can be intermixed somewhat with HTML/DOM on the page. The Register suggests perhaps Flutter's HTML/DOM mode and it's CanvasKit pixel-blaster mode can perhaps interoperate some. It's hard to tell right now how well Flutter might possibly be able to play within the web. But it's hard to recognize even the possibility- to see that the Flutter team really has any empathy what-so-ever for the web & web standards- when their rhetoric so proudly champions things that seem actively bad for the user, when so much of the work still looks like source-free, unmodifiable islands of Flash on the page; it wasn't good then, & it's still harmful now, & it's hard to appreciate the potential gain when it so lopsidedly enhances corporate control. But at least there is some evidence that Flutter is trying to do a little more interweaving than before... although again, it's hard to recognize that when the current rhetoric from the team is so mono-focused on their graphical capabilities above all. [1] https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/25/flutter_3_7/ https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/25/flutter_3_7/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34519279 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34519279 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ursula_Franklin#Technological_society https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ursula_Franklin#Technological_...

mike_hearn 4y ago

I keep hearing good things about Flutter, it's seems like a bit of a quiet hit. We've added support for Flutter Desktop in the next release of Hydraulic Conveyor so it'll get a lot easier to distribute Flutter apps outside the browser soon. There's a demo of how to package Flutter apps built using Github Actions here: https://github.com/hydraulic-software/flutter-demo/ https://github.com/hydraulic-software/flutter-demo/ (see the conveyor.conf file, it's a normal Flutter Desktop app other than that). That won't work with the current release but we should get the next one out this week or next. This should be great for people who want to bring their cross-platform mobile app to laptops and other form factors without exploding costs by needing to write/maintain an HTML version too. That duplication really isn't ideal for a lot of reasons e.g. some users will end up trying to use the web version from mobile so you end up with actually 4x frontend dev costs (iOS, Android, web desktop, web mobile) and for smaller projects it's just hard to justify. Traditionally desktop deployment was a huge pain and that pushes people towards trying to use Chrome for everything, because it handles updates and uploading a few files to a web server is easy. With Conveyor and easily available multi-platform CI for compiles that's fixed now, the hardest part is buying the signing certificates which is just a bit of paperwork and money. The problem with trying to do everything with WebAssembly and canvas is that you're paying a big perf hit and due to cache partitioning you can't really reduce the size hit of an alternative language and graphics stack by amortizing it across different sites like was once possible. And browsers aren't interested in making it easy for people to do that, they want to control the whole experience, so there's lots of paper cuts and apps written with Flutter are ultimately going to be best experienced outside the browser. [1] https://hydraulic.software/ https://hydraulic.software/