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If I can tell that your app is a Flutter app — and unless I’m stuck on an Android phone, I can always tell — your app is being uninstalled. Flutter looks wrong

If I can tell that your app is a Flutter app — and unless I’m stuck on an Android phone, I can always tell — your app is being uninstalled. Flutter looks wrong and behaves wrong and is just Google's modern reincarnation of Swing, which at least had its own display shape. I will especially never use your web app if it is based on Flutter. There's a reason that Electron apps get more grief from users of macOS than anything else, and Flutter is at least two steps worse than Electron IMO.

satvikpendem 3y ago
Good for you, but most people can't tell nor do they care, given that I've shipped Flutter apps across thousands of users, both consumer and enterprise, whom we collect feedback from. Not once did anyone complain about the app visuals or performance itself, just about the lack of features that they are looking forward to. For that kind of developer experience to consumer satisfaction ratio, Flutter is unbeatable. At least Flutter compiles to machine code instead of shipping a browser per app.
- zdragnar 3y ago
  At least in the enterprise space, users are well accustomed to terrible design and UX, because the people with the purchasing power aren't the users, and the users have no purchasing power. Think JIRA, or Epic EHR, or SAP - everyone loves to hate it, but it is the go-to solution because it does what the people paying for it want. The bar is so obnoxiously low in that space that your app literally just needs to work, and people are happy with it. Same goes with a lot of prosumer software. People complain about missing features they need, because having a slick UI is very much a secondary concern, well after "is this actually doing everything I want it to do?" and "does it have all the features I want to accomplish my goals".
  - satvikpendem 3y ago
    > People complain about missing features they need, because having a slick UI is very much a secondary concern, well after "is this actually doing everything I want it to do?" and "does it have all the features I want to accomplish my goals". Well, yes, that is the point of software (and any technology in general), to accomplish the goal that the user wants to accomplish. I'm also not talking about prosumer apps per se, although I've made those too, but true consumer apps as well, no one has really complained about the UX, in fact they actually like that I'm able to make slick animations inside the app for quite a cheap computational cost. Since Flutter is basically a 2D game engine, it's optimized for those operations. I'm never gonna write 5 different apps for 5 different OSes anymore, it's a monumental waste of human labor.
  - flarg 3y ago
    I work in the enterprise software space and the last thing regular users want is a flash modern ui. They want familiarity, because enterprise software is like an extension of a user's mind and they want it to stay the same until they retire. I have seen first hand how a auto factory worker can capture data in a green screen terminal plastic covered keyboard faster than using a flash web UI and a mouse. Speed and familiarity are the orders of the day.
    - satvikpendem 3y ago
      Indeed, it's akin to why some programmers like Vim and other terminal editors over GUI based ones. It's the exact same concept.
- inferiorhuman 3y ago
  > most people can't tell Hard disagree. I'd take the sibling comment about enterprise users getting used to poor UX and take that a step further: most users anywhere expect poor UX and expect to be ignored. Take the Github UI refresh (yes it's not an "app", but hear me out). They've literally reinvented the text display widget in the browser. One of the core things that a browser does and Github reinvented it. Public feedback has often been quite harsh. After a long public beta, it still choked on multibyte characters, it's laggy, it doesn't respond to keystrokes the way a native app (or even the browser itself) does, sometimes it displays spurious characters, and in some cases creates blurry text. Users have had to point out how to deal with multibyte characters Javascript, someone recently complained of excessive eye strain because text is so blurry. What has Github done in the face of that feedback? They've doubled down on their custom widget and largely ignored the reported issues. > For that kind of developer experience to consumer satisfaction Again I strongly doubt you're getting an accurate measure of customer satisfaction if you think folks don't notice non-native apps. Earlier today I was actually trying to think of larger mac-native apps released by not-Apple and couldn't think of anything. The closest I could think of was Fusion 360 and that uses Qt. As much as I notice how janky VSCode and Signal are, I'm not going to bother providing feedback that Electron sticks out like a sore thumb. With Fusion, the only feedback Autodesk ever responded to was the whole "hey you're pointing customers at staging resources" thing. It's a bit of sunk cost fallacy and a bit of "good enough". By and large once a company has picked a tech stack they're not going to move away from it without some serious motivation.
  - satvikpendem 3y ago
    HN, GitHub and other such sites heavily skew towards developers who can tell, yes. I am talking about the vast majority of people who, I guarantee you, would not be able to tell a native component from a non-native one. The teams I have been on have done user testing for precisely this, comparing native vs cross platform frameworks as we were evaluating whether to use them or not. Literally 99% of the people we talked to did not notice or care, which actually falls in line quite nicely to how much of the US population are software engineers, ~1%. If you doubt my results, talk to your non-technical friends and show them apps that are native vs those that aren't and hear what they say.
- littlestymaar 3y ago
  > Good for you, but most people can't tell nor do they care Yeah, Apple diehard fans like to repeat how consistent the experience is on MacOS, how incredible it feels compared to any other platform. But in practice very few people care: Windows has zero consistency anywhere (even in the OS settings themselves) and nobody cares, and even on MacOS nowadays, most people are using electrons apps daily, which breaks the conventions so even MacOS isn't homogeneous either in practice anymore (and Electrons app get a lot of flak on all platforms, but it's mostly about RAM usage and overall mediocre performance, and even then it's mostly nerds like us who complain).
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
wwtdtgotiatl 3y ago
> I can always tell — your app is being uninstalled. I find this very hard to believe given how many big apps are written in flutter and life is made a lot harder without them. Very weird hill to die on too.
- dfee 3y ago
  No dog in the fight. Which big apps are written in Flutter?
  - joshieb 3y ago
    A few of the Google apps are. Google Pay (the new one), Google AdWords, and Google Classroom are big ones. Stadia and Grasshopper were both done with Flutter but are gone now. Toyota, BMW, eBay, Tonal Fitness, HERE Maps are all using Flutter.
    - satvikpendem 3y ago
      YouTube Create, a competitor to TikTok's CapCut, is also in Flutter.
    - halostatue 3y ago
      I have exactly none of those installed. The only Google app that I have installed on my phone is Meet, and I wish I didn’t have to have that installed because it’s the worst meeting app on my phone, but the company uses Google Workspaces. I will go without an app rather than a Flutter app.
- inferiorhuman 3y ago
  > I find this very hard to believe given how many big apps are written in flutter I don't find it particularly hard to believe. Non-native apps easily stick out, but in cases where they're the most popular option their quality is irrelevant. > life is made a lot harder without them. That's a bit of a false dichotomy there, eh? If there were no easy way to create subpar cross platform apps, and the app itself were useful enough, surely someone would pick up the slack, no? The easy way out sucks, but it's just too tempting to resist.
skavi 3y ago
you fairly easily tell on Android as well.
Kiro 3y ago
Imagine being so full of yourself that you think people care whether you uninstall their app or not.
sunshinerag 3y ago
Ditto, I can tell an app is flutter based on the slow launch times and inexplicable crashes. Example: McDonalds app
nyanmatt 3y ago
I can tell you’re just hating because Swing was awesome, and the de-facto standard for university HCI in my day (a day when HCI was the term for UX). What’s an app *supposed* to look like?
- halostatue 3y ago
  I liked Swing, and I liked the "native" Swing look better than the "platform" skins that were offered (they just looked wrong everywhere). Swing failed for a lot of reasons, mostly because Java performance on the desktop just wasn’t where it needed to be. Flutter feels to me like a half-assed rebaking of Swing's basic ideas with worse HCI/UX and an insistence on pretending look like the target platform even if they consistently get it wrong and perform slower than molasses in January. Flutter is something that only an Enterprise Developer could love.
  - nyanmatt 3y ago
    That’s a fair assesment of Swing; Java really held it back. It’s definitely not easy to nail the target platform, and that may be Flutter’s downfall. Even without those native-lookalikes, Flutter still has a very robust rendering engine, and easy to write ffi for native binaries. It can survive on its own.
dingi 3y ago
Most users don't care.
vczf 3y ago
As a counterpoint, the most thoughtfully designed and responsive task management app I've ever used is a Flutter app (http://quire.io http://quire.io) Maybe check it out and see if it changes your mind about what's possible with Flutter.

satvikpendem 3y ago

Good for you, but most people can't tell nor do they care, given that I've shipped Flutter apps across thousands of users, both consumer and enterprise, whom we collect feedback from. Not once did anyone complain about the app visuals or performance itself, just about the lack of features that they are looking forward to. For that kind of developer experience to consumer satisfaction ratio, Flutter is unbeatable. At least Flutter compiles to machine code instead of shipping a browser per app.

zdragnar 3y ago
At least in the enterprise space, users are well accustomed to terrible design and UX, because the people with the purchasing power aren't the users, and the users have no purchasing power. Think JIRA, or Epic EHR, or SAP - everyone loves to hate it, but it is the go-to solution because it does what the people paying for it want. The bar is so obnoxiously low in that space that your app literally just needs to work, and people are happy with it. Same goes with a lot of prosumer software. People complain about missing features they need, because having a slick UI is very much a secondary concern, well after "is this actually doing everything I want it to do?" and "does it have all the features I want to accomplish my goals".
- satvikpendem 3y ago
  > People complain about missing features they need, because having a slick UI is very much a secondary concern, well after "is this actually doing everything I want it to do?" and "does it have all the features I want to accomplish my goals". Well, yes, that is the point of software (and any technology in general), to accomplish the goal that the user wants to accomplish. I'm also not talking about prosumer apps per se, although I've made those too, but true consumer apps as well, no one has really complained about the UX, in fact they actually like that I'm able to make slick animations inside the app for quite a cheap computational cost. Since Flutter is basically a 2D game engine, it's optimized for those operations. I'm never gonna write 5 different apps for 5 different OSes anymore, it's a monumental waste of human labor.
- flarg 3y ago
  I work in the enterprise software space and the last thing regular users want is a flash modern ui. They want familiarity, because enterprise software is like an extension of a user's mind and they want it to stay the same until they retire. I have seen first hand how a auto factory worker can capture data in a green screen terminal plastic covered keyboard faster than using a flash web UI and a mouse. Speed and familiarity are the orders of the day.
  - satvikpendem 3y ago
    Indeed, it's akin to why some programmers like Vim and other terminal editors over GUI based ones. It's the exact same concept.
inferiorhuman 3y ago
> most people can't tell Hard disagree. I'd take the sibling comment about enterprise users getting used to poor UX and take that a step further: most users anywhere expect poor UX and expect to be ignored. Take the Github UI refresh (yes it's not an "app", but hear me out). They've literally reinvented the text display widget in the browser. One of the core things that a browser does and Github reinvented it. Public feedback has often been quite harsh. After a long public beta, it still choked on multibyte characters, it's laggy, it doesn't respond to keystrokes the way a native app (or even the browser itself) does, sometimes it displays spurious characters, and in some cases creates blurry text. Users have had to point out how to deal with multibyte characters Javascript, someone recently complained of excessive eye strain because text is so blurry. What has Github done in the face of that feedback? They've doubled down on their custom widget and largely ignored the reported issues. > For that kind of developer experience to consumer satisfaction Again I strongly doubt you're getting an accurate measure of customer satisfaction if you think folks don't notice non-native apps. Earlier today I was actually trying to think of larger mac-native apps released by not-Apple and couldn't think of anything. The closest I could think of was Fusion 360 and that uses Qt. As much as I notice how janky VSCode and Signal are, I'm not going to bother providing feedback that Electron sticks out like a sore thumb. With Fusion, the only feedback Autodesk ever responded to was the whole "hey you're pointing customers at staging resources" thing. It's a bit of sunk cost fallacy and a bit of "good enough". By and large once a company has picked a tech stack they're not going to move away from it without some serious motivation.
- satvikpendem 3y ago
  HN, GitHub and other such sites heavily skew towards developers who can tell, yes. I am talking about the vast majority of people who, I guarantee you, would not be able to tell a native component from a non-native one. The teams I have been on have done user testing for precisely this, comparing native vs cross platform frameworks as we were evaluating whether to use them or not. Literally 99% of the people we talked to did not notice or care, which actually falls in line quite nicely to how much of the US population are software engineers, ~1%. If you doubt my results, talk to your non-technical friends and show them apps that are native vs those that aren't and hear what they say.
littlestymaar 3y ago
> Good for you, but most people can't tell nor do they care Yeah, Apple diehard fans like to repeat how consistent the experience is on MacOS, how incredible it feels compared to any other platform. But in practice very few people care: Windows has zero consistency anywhere (even in the OS settings themselves) and nobody cares, and even on MacOS nowadays, most people are using electrons apps daily, which breaks the conventions so even MacOS isn't homogeneous either in practice anymore (and Electrons app get a lot of flak on all platforms, but it's mostly about RAM usage and overall mediocre performance, and even then it's mostly nerds like us who complain).
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]

wwtdtgotiatl 3y ago

> I can always tell — your app is being uninstalled. I find this very hard to believe given how many big apps are written in flutter and life is made a lot harder without them. Very weird hill to die on too.

dfee 3y ago
No dog in the fight. Which big apps are written in Flutter?
- joshieb 3y ago
  A few of the Google apps are. Google Pay (the new one), Google AdWords, and Google Classroom are big ones. Stadia and Grasshopper were both done with Flutter but are gone now. Toyota, BMW, eBay, Tonal Fitness, HERE Maps are all using Flutter.
  - satvikpendem 3y ago
    YouTube Create, a competitor to TikTok's CapCut, is also in Flutter.
  - halostatue 3y ago
    I have exactly none of those installed. The only Google app that I have installed on my phone is Meet, and I wish I didn’t have to have that installed because it’s the worst meeting app on my phone, but the company uses Google Workspaces. I will go without an app rather than a Flutter app.
inferiorhuman 3y ago
> I find this very hard to believe given how many big apps are written in flutter I don't find it particularly hard to believe. Non-native apps easily stick out, but in cases where they're the most popular option their quality is irrelevant. > life is made a lot harder without them. That's a bit of a false dichotomy there, eh? If there were no easy way to create subpar cross platform apps, and the app itself were useful enough, surely someone would pick up the slack, no? The easy way out sucks, but it's just too tempting to resist.

skavi 3y ago

you fairly easily tell on Android as well.

Kiro 3y ago

Imagine being so full of yourself that you think people care whether you uninstall their app or not.

sunshinerag 3y ago

Ditto, I can tell an app is flutter based on the slow launch times and inexplicable crashes. Example: McDonalds app

nyanmatt 3y ago

I can tell you’re just hating because Swing was awesome, and the de-facto standard for university HCI in my day (a day when HCI was the term for UX). What’s an app *supposed* to look like?

halostatue 3y ago
I liked Swing, and I liked the "native" Swing look better than the "platform" skins that were offered (they just looked wrong everywhere). Swing failed for a lot of reasons, mostly because Java performance on the desktop just wasn’t where it needed to be. Flutter feels to me like a half-assed rebaking of Swing's basic ideas with worse HCI/UX and an insistence on pretending look like the target platform even if they consistently get it wrong and perform slower than molasses in January. Flutter is something that only an Enterprise Developer could love.
- nyanmatt 3y ago
  That’s a fair assesment of Swing; Java really held it back. It’s definitely not easy to nail the target platform, and that may be Flutter’s downfall. Even without those native-lookalikes, Flutter still has a very robust rendering engine, and easy to write ffi for native binaries. It can survive on its own.

dingi 3y ago

Most users don't care.

vczf 3y ago

As a counterpoint, the most thoughtfully designed and responsive task management app I've ever used is a Flutter app (http://quire.io http://quire.io) Maybe check it out and see if it changes your mind about what's possible with Flutter.