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Every tech has abandoned repos, especially popular ones. As React Native matured in the past few years, the community developed improved solutions to common pr

by Tronno 3y ago

Every tech has abandoned repos, especially popular ones. As React Native matured in the past few years, the community developed improved solutions to common problems, and many older stop-gaps were rendered obsolete. Perhaps that's what you're seeing. The only major competitor to React Native that I'm aware of is Flutter, but it has several drawbacks that make me hesitate to recommend it.

fakedang 3y ago
What disadvantages do you see with flutter though? The jank issue has been fairly minimized with Impeller, so performance-wide, it's fairly on par with RN. The only 2 issues I seem to find are the core Flutter team leaving Google, and Flutter web being unstable (and honestly I just wish they stopped developing for web and focusing on mobile). Another issue is learning a new language, but Dart being strongly typed makes it much easier to work with than Javascript. In either case, RN and Flutter should be used only for the MVP stage, and once you can, you have to immediately switch to building on native at the right time.
- akmarinov 3y ago
  The talent pool is non-existent. You’d be crazy to use tech in your stack that you can’t find people for. At least with RN, there are thousands of React devs out there.
  - fakedang 3y ago
    You don't hire for the tech stack though. Flutter has a much faster learning curve than RN, evidenced by its growing popularity among beginners. In my experience, it's not going to be hard for a React developer to pick up Dart or Flutter than it is the other way round - in fact, there are blog articles by eBay and BMW, where their tech teams easily learnt flutter and deployed production apps within a week. Of course, most companies hiring mobile devs do it wrong. Flutter hasn't been around long enough the same way React has, so years of experience is a meaningless metric here.
    - akmarinov 3y ago
      Have to disagree. Yes, every experienced dev can probably pick up any other language/framework and be able to work with it within 6 months - things aren’t fundamentally that different. But these people can easily switch jobs and it’s doubtful most are ok to hitch their wagon to Flutter - a nascent framework with basically no crossover to web development and a big company behind it, known for killing its toys on a whim. Much easier to just go do RN elsewhere.
  - realusername 3y ago
    The learning curve is very low though, especially for JS/React developers. Flutter did not come from nowhere, Dart is heavily inspired by Javascript and the rendering model is close to React. The issue will rather be that they won't want to work on it due to their career than the pure tech capabilities.
- Tronno 3y ago
  You named all of them - jank, a new language, and crucially, long-term support from Google, who are so untrustworthy in that regard that it's turned into a meme.
  - fakedang 3y ago
    Flutter is still open source with a stronger community than any of its competitors. I think it will be around for a long while. For some reason, it's especially popular in Asia, particularly India and China. There are already entire modules being developed just for Flutter in China, so I wouldn't put it too soon in killedbygoogle. The iOS issue is a minimal issue with the new Impeller API (not sure if you're updated on that). There is still a bit of jank, but between putting out an MVP vs another month for a native app, I'd say go with Flutter for the MVP. Then switch to native if your app takes off.
LordN00b 3y ago
I've been working with three flutter apps for the past two years (Android and ios), and the improvements in the platform performance have been consistently trending up. One of our apps has 6 video players running at one point, and that doesn't seem to tank performance, there is an integrated Unity game and several other 'heavy' features. It's resliant and performant for the basic task of getting content on the screen. Then dropping down to the individual OS for certain features (video etc) is a breeze. My only gripe is it's not opinionated enough as framework, and tries to be all things to all devs which makes Architectural changes contentious against competing opinions. (See trying to implement a the latest Router from scratch) The downside is the mess of flutter web. As an engineering team everyone can be Flutter dev, but only a few have to be a Kotlin/Swift dev to implement features. nb: RN, or Flutter are still more competitive than Maui however.
- synergy20 3y ago
  the flutter tech leader just left Google(Hixie), which cast some doubts on flutter itself to me.
  - gardenhedge 3y ago
    Here's a post from that person on it: https://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1700627532&count=1 https://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1700627532&count=1
    - davidmigloz 3y ago
      Hixie is still working on Flutter as he mentions in the post (just check the Flutter Discord)

by Tronno 3y ago

fakedang 3y ago

What disadvantages do you see with flutter though? The jank issue has been fairly minimized with Impeller, so performance-wide, it's fairly on par with RN. The only 2 issues I seem to find are the core Flutter team leaving Google, and Flutter web being unstable (and honestly I just wish they stopped developing for web and focusing on mobile). Another issue is learning a new language, but Dart being strongly typed makes it much easier to work with than Javascript. In either case, RN and Flutter should be used only for the MVP stage, and once you can, you have to immediately switch to building on native at the right time.

akmarinov 3y ago
The talent pool is non-existent. You’d be crazy to use tech in your stack that you can’t find people for. At least with RN, there are thousands of React devs out there.
- fakedang 3y ago
  You don't hire for the tech stack though. Flutter has a much faster learning curve than RN, evidenced by its growing popularity among beginners. In my experience, it's not going to be hard for a React developer to pick up Dart or Flutter than it is the other way round - in fact, there are blog articles by eBay and BMW, where their tech teams easily learnt flutter and deployed production apps within a week. Of course, most companies hiring mobile devs do it wrong. Flutter hasn't been around long enough the same way React has, so years of experience is a meaningless metric here.
  - akmarinov 3y ago
    Have to disagree. Yes, every experienced dev can probably pick up any other language/framework and be able to work with it within 6 months - things aren’t fundamentally that different. But these people can easily switch jobs and it’s doubtful most are ok to hitch their wagon to Flutter - a nascent framework with basically no crossover to web development and a big company behind it, known for killing its toys on a whim. Much easier to just go do RN elsewhere.
- realusername 3y ago
  The learning curve is very low though, especially for JS/React developers. Flutter did not come from nowhere, Dart is heavily inspired by Javascript and the rendering model is close to React. The issue will rather be that they won't want to work on it due to their career than the pure tech capabilities.
Tronno 3y ago
You named all of them - jank, a new language, and crucially, long-term support from Google, who are so untrustworthy in that regard that it's turned into a meme.
- fakedang 3y ago
  Flutter is still open source with a stronger community than any of its competitors. I think it will be around for a long while. For some reason, it's especially popular in Asia, particularly India and China. There are already entire modules being developed just for Flutter in China, so I wouldn't put it too soon in killedbygoogle. The iOS issue is a minimal issue with the new Impeller API (not sure if you're updated on that). There is still a bit of jank, but between putting out an MVP vs another month for a native app, I'd say go with Flutter for the MVP. Then switch to native if your app takes off.

LordN00b 3y ago

I've been working with three flutter apps for the past two years (Android and ios), and the improvements in the platform performance have been consistently trending up. One of our apps has 6 video players running at one point, and that doesn't seem to tank performance, there is an integrated Unity game and several other 'heavy' features. It's resliant and performant for the basic task of getting content on the screen. Then dropping down to the individual OS for certain features (video etc) is a breeze. My only gripe is it's not opinionated enough as framework, and tries to be all things to all devs which makes Architectural changes contentious against competing opinions. (See trying to implement a the latest Router from scratch) The downside is the mess of flutter web. As an engineering team everyone can be Flutter dev, but only a few have to be a Kotlin/Swift dev to implement features. nb: RN, or Flutter are still more competitive than Maui however.

synergy20 3y ago
the flutter tech leader just left Google(Hixie), which cast some doubts on flutter itself to me.
- gardenhedge 3y ago
  Here's a post from that person on it: https://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1700627532&count=1 https://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1700627532&count=1
  - davidmigloz 3y ago
    Hixie is still working on Flutter as he mentions in the post (just check the Flutter Discord)