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The problem with Ionic and React Native has always been the JS/Native bridge. Works great when you're coding it, but to debug any problem rationally you need bo

The problem with Ionic and React Native has always been the JS/Native bridge. Works great when you're coding it, but to debug any problem rationally you need both native platform and JS expertise. This problem then fans out into every plugin, every open source library, every native-specific "exception", every random device issue. Then the minute you want deal with any native problem, both Android and iOS (and their stores) have nothing to help you. Play Console stack traces just started supporting Kotlin. Forget trying to debug a pile of JS on top of a pile of Java for some obscure plugin that is ANR'ing. Flutter at least tries to fix this problem by taking the Unity approach: One-click build for each platform, where the framework owns the native problem. Then push everything to native graphics as much as possible, down to DSL-specific management of threads. However Flutter has been slow to be adopted into big projects, and made the mistake of choosing Dart over Kotlin. It's stuck in a purgatory of having fans, but not the level of success to qualify as a "breakout" for Google. The hard truth for mobile development right now, is the same hard truth that existed in 2010: Nothing beats native. You try to do too much cross-platform, you wind up chasing two rabbits with no dinner. Even if Google solves every development problem under the sun, Apple is going to Apple. They own the highest-paying customers, they do what they want with the opaqueness of obsidian, and are the very definition of "full stack" from chips to platform. I am rooting for Flutter, I am rooting for a cross-platform utopia, but outside of game platforms it feels like we are farther than even 5 years ago.

duxup 3y ago
I use react native and I enjoy it, and I agree. My biggest fear is running fine … and then when compiled something different. And it happens. For “simple” apps I’m very happy with react native. I can’t say enough good things about it there … but I’m really nervous (especially as the primary developer) as if I’ve got this debugging black hole/ sword of damocles hanging around. For web developers who want to hit both app stores I still highly recommend it. But with the note that you want to be deliberate about changes / know about that black hole.
- lchengify 3y ago
  Yep. Also, the decision is different when you don't use the app store for distribution. I know lots of niche business-specific use cases where they don't care if it crashes half the time. If you need something on mobile quickly for a narrow use case, RN / Ionic can be your friend.
mrbombastic 3y ago
You nailed it, if we had a framework that took flutters approach but let you build in typescript or kotlin things would look a lot more appealing for cross platform dev.
lawgimenez 3y ago
Flutter’s demo app is roughly 70MB in APK size, our native production app is around 20MB.
- lchengify 3y ago
  Yep, this is a problem that Flutter shares with Unity: It's BYO(everything) and not at all APK optimized. You use native, Android won't re-download libraries that are already on the device. Drops your APK size, increases your rankings. FWIW, Apple doesn't care as much, and their users are used to it, so that's a plus I suppose. Not the same but also related: Using RN and Ionic can just destroy battery life and CPU for apps because you are essentially running a full JS engine on top of all the native stuff. This can cause them to get aggressively killed when backgrounded and / or punished in other ways.
  - lawgimenez 3y ago
    Yes, but in a country where internet is very expensive. This is a dealbreaker.
- cosmok 3y ago
  Debug builds are big. Production releases of Apps are very small - one of my Flutter Apps 7.6 MB.
- fakedang 3y ago
  Sure you checking the right build? Production builds are usually much smaller in size than debug builds. I had a complicated app that was only 20 MB in production, but like 300 MB in debug.
sergiotapia 3y ago
With the utmost respect to the gargantuan levels of effort put in by hundreds of developers: I've never worked with tools where I had to guess/pray every morning "Will my app compile and run today?" until I worked with React Native. Seemingly randomly my apps would not build and I had to waste entire days chasing down random Github issues and comments in unrelated packages to get things running. I have never since experienced something like that either. I'm thankful that I don't have to work with React Native anymore. Even my younger brother has given up and just bit the bullet to work exclusively with Swift natively for mobile apps. Again, with all due respect. :pray:
- Tommstein 3y ago
  > I've never worked with tools where I had to guess/pray every morning "Will my app compile and run today?" until I worked with React Native. Happened to me building a Kivy Android app using Buildozer. That marked the end of my use of Kivy and Buildozer. I really want to use Python to build apps, but not as much as I want to not randomly have apps suddenly refusing to build out of the blue, and Kotlin is a damn nice language.
nl 3y ago
I tried Flutter recently. It's so good compared to any other cross platform solution. Dart is an easy language, but wow I wish they used anything else. It's a big mistake making people adopt a language as well as a framework.
- ShadowBanThis01 3y ago
  Exactly. I wanted to consider Flutter, but no way could I sell my company (already stretched thin with developer resources) on a platform using a language that nobody (including me) knows and that has essentially no payoff for learning outside this one thing.
- lchengify 3y ago
  Dart is pretty straightforward, but there are some idiomatic concepts you need to get just to get started. Laying out a View and updating values is the most obvious one, but also how startup and libraries integrate also comes to mind. The biggest problem with Dart is that it looks nothing like other UI languages ... by design. It ostensibly was supposed to be a uniform UI layout language, but it suffers from the "XKCD standards" [1] problem of now making its own decisions with no basis for comparison. To code a cross platform app, you already likely need to know Objective C, Swift, Kotlin, Java, and/or JS. If you do Unity, you need C#. Dart looks like none of these, and is at best half-loved by Google as much as say, Go. I almost want to just spend time writing a Kotlin -> Dart compiler, but I feel like that would make the problem worse. "Now we have 16 standards". [1] https://xkcd.com/927/ https://xkcd.com/927/
  - pzo 3y ago
    Maybe someone then will make dart to kotlin transpiler and port whole flutter to kotlin? I seen unity framework that ported pretty much whole flutter to c#/unity
ShadowBanThis01 3y ago
The problem with Flutter is Dart. I considered it for a cross-platform project for my company, but ruled it out because it uses a language that essentially nobody knows. And when I say nobody, remember that the real world (and the contractors available in it) is not Hacker News. I wish Google would settle on a language or two and stop with the seemingly endless parade of new ones. Kotlin for mobile, and ? for everything else. Or just... Kotlin.
- pohuing 3y ago
  Fortunately dart is fairly predicatable. It does few special things and they're all very approachable for anyone familiar with the other gc'ed oop languages(java, c# etc.). While I wish it had some more useful features, its mundanity was a big boon when picking it up.
- karmakaze 3y ago
  The main reason for Kotlin's recent popularity is from its use on Android. Not that long ago it wasn't all that popular while many jvm better-than-java languages were competing. Same for Go. If a substantial amount of Android (or other/cross-platform) dev happens with Flutter, Dart will become just as common. As a language, it's not great, but it's also not bad either.
  - pjmlp 3y ago
    Except the little detail that Android team couldn't care less about Dart/Flutter, it isn't even part of the official Android SDK. Jake Wharton has a few rants about the Fluter/Dart vs Android politics.
  - lchengify 3y ago
    It's true that Kotlin wasn't a breakout success 5 years ago. However, I would argue Kotlin's design decisions made it destined for its current success, whereas Dart has not. The most obvious of this was same-build compatibility with Java. Mixing Kotlin and Java made it super easy to switch, and made using it a no-brainer vs other solutions. Android Studio also has a button that auto-converts Java to Kotlin, so in many cases a wholesale rewrite isn't even necessary. At this point, Kotlin has also become a goto for backend Java for stream processing and other open-source JVM projects. It's rapidly replacing things like Scala for Flink, as an example. Maybe Dart survives by the sheer force of will of Flutter, but I don't think there's a chance it catches Kotlin.
deleted 3y ago
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bob1029 3y ago
Webapp beats native now IMO. The antitrust pressure on apple is forcing the last holdout (iOS Safari) to step into line. We've got our B2B customers using web apps on iPads managed via MDM solutions right now. Camera, location, push, Home Screen icon, etc all working flawlessly. It took us almost 3 years to get to this point, but it's very stable now. I agree you still need App Store presence for B2C, but there are paths here too with vanilla web stacks.
- anaganisk 3y ago
  Webapp beating native is a stretch.
  - theturtletalks 3y ago
    It’s getting there. Look up react-native-web, tamagui, and solito. Almost all the code is shared between web, iOS, and Android and the web experience feels like a native app[0]. 0. https://tamagui.dev https://tamagui.dev
  - bob1029 3y ago
    Is there a specific use case you have in mind that would be infeasible to do as a web app? I'd even be interested in arguments about poor UX, because a lot of this has been resolved recently.
    - anaganisk 3y ago
      Top of my mind. Discovery, apart from devs (even that is a stretch), when I say app people quickly open play store/app store. When I say you just gotta click add to the home screen. They're like, you don't have an app? Isn't that just a failure of UX? I once tried to convince a founder so hard to go with webapp, I gave every advantage I could think of, then in our survey not one of our users was comfortable, they all weirded out. But hey web app works if it's forced like in a enterprise or MDM setting, but people would rather open app stores. Despite the flak, consumers trust app stores at some level than a random website, even if its more secure since it can't access a lot of APIs, but they don't know that. Every framework ionic, flutter etc I've tried since Cordova has had some weird feel to it. I can quickly recognize a webapp packaged as native in the first two mins, most of the users I worked with just think it's slow or janky since they Don't understand it's a webapp vs native.

duxup 3y ago

I use react native and I enjoy it, and I agree. My biggest fear is running fine … and then when compiled something different. And it happens. For “simple” apps I’m very happy with react native. I can’t say enough good things about it there … but I’m really nervous (especially as the primary developer) as if I’ve got this debugging black hole/ sword of damocles hanging around. For web developers who want to hit both app stores I still highly recommend it. But with the note that you want to be deliberate about changes / know about that black hole.

lchengify 3y ago
Yep. Also, the decision is different when you don't use the app store for distribution. I know lots of niche business-specific use cases where they don't care if it crashes half the time. If you need something on mobile quickly for a narrow use case, RN / Ionic can be your friend.

mrbombastic 3y ago

You nailed it, if we had a framework that took flutters approach but let you build in typescript or kotlin things would look a lot more appealing for cross platform dev.

lawgimenez 3y ago

Flutter’s demo app is roughly 70MB in APK size, our native production app is around 20MB.

lchengify 3y ago
Yep, this is a problem that Flutter shares with Unity: It's BYO(everything) and not at all APK optimized. You use native, Android won't re-download libraries that are already on the device. Drops your APK size, increases your rankings. FWIW, Apple doesn't care as much, and their users are used to it, so that's a plus I suppose. Not the same but also related: Using RN and Ionic can just destroy battery life and CPU for apps because you are essentially running a full JS engine on top of all the native stuff. This can cause them to get aggressively killed when backgrounded and / or punished in other ways.
- lawgimenez 3y ago
  Yes, but in a country where internet is very expensive. This is a dealbreaker.
cosmok 3y ago
Debug builds are big. Production releases of Apps are very small - one of my Flutter Apps 7.6 MB.
fakedang 3y ago
Sure you checking the right build? Production builds are usually much smaller in size than debug builds. I had a complicated app that was only 20 MB in production, but like 300 MB in debug.

sergiotapia 3y ago

With the utmost respect to the gargantuan levels of effort put in by hundreds of developers: I've never worked with tools where I had to guess/pray every morning "Will my app compile and run today?" until I worked with React Native. Seemingly randomly my apps would not build and I had to waste entire days chasing down random Github issues and comments in unrelated packages to get things running. I have never since experienced something like that either. I'm thankful that I don't have to work with React Native anymore. Even my younger brother has given up and just bit the bullet to work exclusively with Swift natively for mobile apps. Again, with all due respect. :pray:

Tommstein 3y ago
> I've never worked with tools where I had to guess/pray every morning "Will my app compile and run today?" until I worked with React Native. Happened to me building a Kivy Android app using Buildozer. That marked the end of my use of Kivy and Buildozer. I really want to use Python to build apps, but not as much as I want to not randomly have apps suddenly refusing to build out of the blue, and Kotlin is a damn nice language.

nl 3y ago

I tried Flutter recently. It's so good compared to any other cross platform solution. Dart is an easy language, but wow I wish they used anything else. It's a big mistake making people adopt a language as well as a framework.

ShadowBanThis01 3y ago
Exactly. I wanted to consider Flutter, but no way could I sell my company (already stretched thin with developer resources) on a platform using a language that nobody (including me) knows and that has essentially no payoff for learning outside this one thing.
lchengify 3y ago
Dart is pretty straightforward, but there are some idiomatic concepts you need to get just to get started. Laying out a View and updating values is the most obvious one, but also how startup and libraries integrate also comes to mind. The biggest problem with Dart is that it looks nothing like other UI languages ... by design. It ostensibly was supposed to be a uniform UI layout language, but it suffers from the "XKCD standards" [1] problem of now making its own decisions with no basis for comparison. To code a cross platform app, you already likely need to know Objective C, Swift, Kotlin, Java, and/or JS. If you do Unity, you need C#. Dart looks like none of these, and is at best half-loved by Google as much as say, Go. I almost want to just spend time writing a Kotlin -> Dart compiler, but I feel like that would make the problem worse. "Now we have 16 standards". [1] https://xkcd.com/927/ https://xkcd.com/927/
- pzo 3y ago
  Maybe someone then will make dart to kotlin transpiler and port whole flutter to kotlin? I seen unity framework that ported pretty much whole flutter to c#/unity

ShadowBanThis01 3y ago

The problem with Flutter is Dart. I considered it for a cross-platform project for my company, but ruled it out because it uses a language that essentially nobody knows. And when I say nobody, remember that the real world (and the contractors available in it) is not Hacker News. I wish Google would settle on a language or two and stop with the seemingly endless parade of new ones. Kotlin for mobile, and ? for everything else. Or just... Kotlin.

pohuing 3y ago
Fortunately dart is fairly predicatable. It does few special things and they're all very approachable for anyone familiar with the other gc'ed oop languages(java, c# etc.). While I wish it had some more useful features, its mundanity was a big boon when picking it up.
karmakaze 3y ago
The main reason for Kotlin's recent popularity is from its use on Android. Not that long ago it wasn't all that popular while many jvm better-than-java languages were competing. Same for Go. If a substantial amount of Android (or other/cross-platform) dev happens with Flutter, Dart will become just as common. As a language, it's not great, but it's also not bad either.
- pjmlp 3y ago
  Except the little detail that Android team couldn't care less about Dart/Flutter, it isn't even part of the official Android SDK. Jake Wharton has a few rants about the Fluter/Dart vs Android politics.
- lchengify 3y ago
  It's true that Kotlin wasn't a breakout success 5 years ago. However, I would argue Kotlin's design decisions made it destined for its current success, whereas Dart has not. The most obvious of this was same-build compatibility with Java. Mixing Kotlin and Java made it super easy to switch, and made using it a no-brainer vs other solutions. Android Studio also has a button that auto-converts Java to Kotlin, so in many cases a wholesale rewrite isn't even necessary. At this point, Kotlin has also become a goto for backend Java for stream processing and other open-source JVM projects. It's rapidly replacing things like Scala for Flink, as an example. Maybe Dart survives by the sheer force of will of Flutter, but I don't think there's a chance it catches Kotlin.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

bob1029 3y ago

Webapp beats native now IMO. The antitrust pressure on apple is forcing the last holdout (iOS Safari) to step into line. We've got our B2B customers using web apps on iPads managed via MDM solutions right now. Camera, location, push, Home Screen icon, etc all working flawlessly. It took us almost 3 years to get to this point, but it's very stable now. I agree you still need App Store presence for B2C, but there are paths here too with vanilla web stacks.

anaganisk 3y ago
Webapp beating native is a stretch.
- theturtletalks 3y ago
  It’s getting there. Look up react-native-web, tamagui, and solito. Almost all the code is shared between web, iOS, and Android and the web experience feels like a native app[0]. 0. https://tamagui.dev https://tamagui.dev
- bob1029 3y ago
  Is there a specific use case you have in mind that would be infeasible to do as a web app? I'd even be interested in arguments about poor UX, because a lot of this has been resolved recently.
  - anaganisk 3y ago
    Top of my mind. Discovery, apart from devs (even that is a stretch), when I say app people quickly open play store/app store. When I say you just gotta click add to the home screen. They're like, you don't have an app? Isn't that just a failure of UX? I once tried to convince a founder so hard to go with webapp, I gave every advantage I could think of, then in our survey not one of our users was comfortable, they all weirded out. But hey web app works if it's forced like in a enterprise or MDM setting, but people would rather open app stores. Despite the flak, consumers trust app stores at some level than a random website, even if its more secure since it can't access a lot of APIs, but they don't know that. Every framework ionic, flutter etc I've tried since Cordova has had some weird feel to it. I can quickly recognize a webapp packaged as native in the first two mins, most of the users I worked with just think it's slow or janky since they Don't understand it's a webapp vs native.