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As a Flutter developer, it obviously makes me uneasy. I bet on Flutter around 5 years ago. I was fully aware of Google's history of killing its products, but I

As a Flutter developer, it obviously makes me uneasy. I bet on Flutter around 5 years ago. I was fully aware of Google's history of killing its products, but I thought making iOS and Android apps with Flutter is just so easy and Dart is such an upgrade over JS/TS (in my experience at least, I know you should always bet on JS), that I'll just enjoy the ride while it lasts. I could even see Dart getting popular on the backend. Since then, they started prioritizing more and more stuff I don't care about, important core members fled the project one way or another, the native solutions have caught up big time, and long standing issues never get fixed. Among cross platform apps, RN still dominates Flutter when it comes to apps that people actually use. I find Dart still a great language, but apparently, I'm in a very small minority. Today, Dart's only practical purpose is to serve Flutter. I had to realize that a (non-Flutter) frontend web framework, or anything significant on the backend ain't gonna happen.

mikece 2y ago
When Flutter was first announced I was into Xamarin development but I quickly soured on the concept of a write-once, run cross-platform mobile app utopia. On every project I was involved with we ran into the same scenario: 80 to 90% of the app was easy to produce but that last 10% accounted for 95% of the effort and surfaced paradoxes and bugs so nasty we ended up swearing we could have done everything better and faster to have written two separate apps from scratch in Kotlin/Swift as the vendors recommend in their developer documentation. The other practical take-away is that, with only one exception, not a single mobile app I worked on needed to be a mobile app per se: they all would have worked just fine as a mobile website (or as a hybrid app if local storage or push notifications were truly deemed mission critical and essential -- but that's less a product needs argument and more a manager's ego argument). And now with elements of PWA being supported even by iOS the need even for a hybrid app is dwindling to near zero. Which makes it all the more curious to me why React Native still has the following it does. Can it all be explained by inertia?
- Apocryphon 2y ago
  > Can it all be explained by inertia? The tyranny of JavaScript frameworks

mikece 2y ago

When Flutter was first announced I was into Xamarin development but I quickly soured on the concept of a write-once, run cross-platform mobile app utopia. On every project I was involved with we ran into the same scenario: 80 to 90% of the app was easy to produce but that last 10% accounted for 95% of the effort and surfaced paradoxes and bugs so nasty we ended up swearing we could have done everything better and faster to have written two separate apps from scratch in Kotlin/Swift as the vendors recommend in their developer documentation. The other practical take-away is that, with only one exception, not a single mobile app I worked on needed to be a mobile app per se: they all would have worked just fine as a mobile website (or as a hybrid app if local storage or push notifications were truly deemed mission critical and essential -- but that's less a product needs argument and more a manager's ego argument). And now with elements of PWA being supported even by iOS the need even for a hybrid app is dwindling to near zero. Which makes it all the more curious to me why React Native still has the following it does. Can it all be explained by inertia?

Apocryphon 2y ago
> Can it all be explained by inertia? The tyranny of JavaScript frameworks