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Obviously I feel the pain of the OP but I think he blames the wrong thing. Flutter is a ( viable ) technology that’s being growing for the last few years. A ve

Obviously I feel the pain of the OP but I think he blames the wrong thing. Flutter is a ( viable ) technology that’s being growing for the last few years. A very significant percentage of new mobile apps are programmed with it these days. It seems his problems have everything to do with the local job market and not the technology. With the added bonus that you can be a single man operation and release your own apps for both iOS, Android and the desktops. I’m not a fanboy and even less of Google but Flutter really offers the ability to make lemonade if the job market gives you lemons.

candiddevmike 3y ago
Flutter is pretty old if you think about it and still has too many rough edges and not a lot of big name adoption. The project is too ambitious, and the features seem more like PoCs than something you can rely on in production, IMO.
- bmitc 3y ago
  This is what has prevented me from diving into Flutter for a personal project. Although it supports desktop and web, it is first and foremost a tool for building mobile applications. For desktop, too much of the API is built around the assumption that you are on a mobile device with a single window and a finger as the pointing device. Feature requests for desktop, such as proper support for mouse-based drag and drop and multiple windows, are either ignored or take forever to develop. Any platform that tries to support web, mobile, and desktop all at once, of which there are many, are destined to this fate of being spread too broadly and thinly.
  - pohuing 3y ago
    What do you mean by mouse based drag and drop? As far as I can tell Draggable and DragTarget work fine on windows and macos at least.
    - bmitc 3y ago
      The API assumes you are on a relatively small screen and using a finger to drag and drop. Thus, it doesn't provide functionality that you would expect if you were on a desktop or laptop monitor with more space and using a mouse and keyboard where there is a wider variety of things that you would like to happen with a drag and drop interface. The API is primarily assuming you're taking a widget and dragging it with a finger to somewhere just an inch or two away on a phone or tablet screen. Yes, drag and drop "works" on desktop as it is, but the API is not well-designed for desktop-based usage. A lot of ad-hoc type of behavior using global state has to be used.
scarface_74 3y ago
As long as you don’t include in that number - most apps built by Google.
- lockhouse 3y ago
  Is that actually true though? Most major Google apps predate Flutter. I was under the impression that a lot of their apps are either custom web view wrappers or native with shared C++ code for business logic. Stadia and Google Pay are the only consumer facing Google apps I’m aware of that are made with Flutter.
  - UltimateEdge 3y ago
    Family Link [1] also looks like it's made with Flutter (I checked the DevTools in the browser). [1]: https://familylink.google.com https://familylink.google.com
  - scarface_74 3y ago
    Most of their apps are native. They learned the same thing that Facebook learned years ago. Cross platform GUI apps have always sucked - or at least since Java tried to popularize them in the late 90s.
  - mhoad 3y ago
    Ads is all flutter on mobile and Dart on the web. Fuchsia is an OS that is also using Flutter for their entire UI layer. I think there’s more a case of there isn’t an argument for doing but rewrites just because Flutter is now a thing but in a greenfield scenario it would be a serious contender
    - scarface_74 3y ago
      So you can invest your time I learning Fuschsia and Flutter. What could possibly go wrong? But that’s not demonstrating the promise of a great cross platform experience.
      - 3y ago

candiddevmike 3y ago

Flutter is pretty old if you think about it and still has too many rough edges and not a lot of big name adoption. The project is too ambitious, and the features seem more like PoCs than something you can rely on in production, IMO.

bmitc 3y ago
This is what has prevented me from diving into Flutter for a personal project. Although it supports desktop and web, it is first and foremost a tool for building mobile applications. For desktop, too much of the API is built around the assumption that you are on a mobile device with a single window and a finger as the pointing device. Feature requests for desktop, such as proper support for mouse-based drag and drop and multiple windows, are either ignored or take forever to develop. Any platform that tries to support web, mobile, and desktop all at once, of which there are many, are destined to this fate of being spread too broadly and thinly.
- pohuing 3y ago
  What do you mean by mouse based drag and drop? As far as I can tell Draggable and DragTarget work fine on windows and macos at least.
  - bmitc 3y ago
    The API assumes you are on a relatively small screen and using a finger to drag and drop. Thus, it doesn't provide functionality that you would expect if you were on a desktop or laptop monitor with more space and using a mouse and keyboard where there is a wider variety of things that you would like to happen with a drag and drop interface. The API is primarily assuming you're taking a widget and dragging it with a finger to somewhere just an inch or two away on a phone or tablet screen. Yes, drag and drop "works" on desktop as it is, but the API is not well-designed for desktop-based usage. A lot of ad-hoc type of behavior using global state has to be used.

scarface_74 3y ago

As long as you don’t include in that number - most apps built by Google.

lockhouse 3y ago
Is that actually true though? Most major Google apps predate Flutter. I was under the impression that a lot of their apps are either custom web view wrappers or native with shared C++ code for business logic. Stadia and Google Pay are the only consumer facing Google apps I’m aware of that are made with Flutter.
- UltimateEdge 3y ago
  Family Link [1] also looks like it's made with Flutter (I checked the DevTools in the browser). [1]: https://familylink.google.com https://familylink.google.com
- scarface_74 3y ago
  Most of their apps are native. They learned the same thing that Facebook learned years ago. Cross platform GUI apps have always sucked - or at least since Java tried to popularize them in the late 90s.
- mhoad 3y ago
  Ads is all flutter on mobile and Dart on the web. Fuchsia is an OS that is also using Flutter for their entire UI layer. I think there’s more a case of there isn’t an argument for doing but rewrites just because Flutter is now a thing but in a greenfield scenario it would be a serious contender
  - scarface_74 3y ago
    So you can invest your time I learning Fuschsia and Flutter. What could possibly go wrong? But that’s not demonstrating the promise of a great cross platform experience.
    - 3y ago