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I don’t have much app experience, I’m mostly a back-end guy trying to build some prototypes and (hopefully) one product. I’m not in a position to give anyone a

by biztos 2y ago

I don’t have much app experience, I’m mostly a back-end guy trying to build some prototypes and (hopefully) one product. I’m not in a position to give anyone advice, but I’d love to find SwiftUI but cross-platform and usable from anything other than XCode (well maybe not Ed…) and native GUI and a pony. For my product I need to support Mac, Windows and eventually iOS/iPadOS. For prototypes iOS is enough. I don’t mind learning new languages for this, but ideally there would be some advantage in knowing the language itself. I’ve been looking at lots of frameworks over the past month. The most tempting thing so far is Flutter, but I have nagging doubts: because it’s not native UI, I worry about that being a no-go for some large customer down the road, and also about alienating power users. I looked at React Native but it’s not very good for desktop yet as far as I could tell (and the demo app from the documentation doesn’t work, which is a bad sign). Which is too bad because I was impressed with Expo, if I just needed phones I’d probably use that. I looked at Avalonia but it has the opposite problem. Today I’m looking at Tauri for the Nth time: at least I could improve my Rust, and it seems to have momentum. Doing the UI in a web view is kinda sad, though, after trying SwiftUI. Just building multiple apps is not realistic, I’m a solo dev and want to get this to market in my lifetime, and it only makes sense if I have both Mac and Windows. Very happy to hear recommendations from people who have done this!

cageface 2y ago
If you really want native look and feel then really your only choice is to use the native toolkits. I'm not convinced many users care that much about this though. They spend most of their day using apps that don't use native controls and I think they're all pretty used to it by now. I prototyped a bunch of different desktop toolkits and I think that today Flutter is by far the most polished and mature. I've had overall a very positive experience using it for my music app: https://plastaq.com/minimoon https://plastaq.com/minimoon The threat of Google canceling it is real though. I suppose if that happens I'll switch to Tauri or just give up on Windows and Android and do SwiftUI. My experiences with SwiftUI to this point have not been very positive though. Kotlin Multiplatform might also be an option at some point but it doesn't seem that close today. Unfortunately it seems like none of the os vendors are making their desktop APIs a priority these days.
- biztos 2y ago
  Thanks, I will have a look at that. Serendipitously, I'm in the market for a new music player! Yeah the Google risk... seems like they came out strong in support of Flutter at their last dev conference, but at the same time it does _not_ look like they're using it for their main apps.
  - cageface 2y ago
    Please let me know if you have any feedback or suggestions for the player. And yes I’d feel more confident in Flutter if Google was dogfooding it a lot more.
    - mst 2y ago
      Without expressing an opinion on Flutter as such, it's worth remembering that Google is a big enough organisation that even -some- internal apps being built using it is quite a commitment, and it not having spread further internally could easily be a social or political rather than a technical issue.
      - cageface 2y ago
        I don't think it it's a technical issue. On a technical level Flutter is mostly great. But Google has been doing aggressive cost cutting lately and not having Flutter in use in that many apps makes it more vulnerable.
- throwaway2037 2y ago
  > If you really want native look and feel then really your only choice is to use the native toolkits. What about Qt?

by biztos 2y ago

cageface 2y ago

If you really want native look and feel then really your only choice is to use the native toolkits. I'm not convinced many users care that much about this though. They spend most of their day using apps that don't use native controls and I think they're all pretty used to it by now. I prototyped a bunch of different desktop toolkits and I think that today Flutter is by far the most polished and mature. I've had overall a very positive experience using it for my music app: https://plastaq.com/minimoon https://plastaq.com/minimoon The threat of Google canceling it is real though. I suppose if that happens I'll switch to Tauri or just give up on Windows and Android and do SwiftUI. My experiences with SwiftUI to this point have not been very positive though. Kotlin Multiplatform might also be an option at some point but it doesn't seem that close today. Unfortunately it seems like none of the os vendors are making their desktop APIs a priority these days.

biztos 2y ago
Thanks, I will have a look at that. Serendipitously, I'm in the market for a new music player! Yeah the Google risk... seems like they came out strong in support of Flutter at their last dev conference, but at the same time it does _not_ look like they're using it for their main apps.
- cageface 2y ago
  Please let me know if you have any feedback or suggestions for the player. And yes I’d feel more confident in Flutter if Google was dogfooding it a lot more.
  - mst 2y ago
    Without expressing an opinion on Flutter as such, it's worth remembering that Google is a big enough organisation that even -some- internal apps being built using it is quite a commitment, and it not having spread further internally could easily be a social or political rather than a technical issue.
    - cageface 2y ago
      I don't think it it's a technical issue. On a technical level Flutter is mostly great. But Google has been doing aggressive cost cutting lately and not having Flutter in use in that many apps makes it more vulnerable.
throwaway2037 2y ago
> If you really want native look and feel then really your only choice is to use the native toolkits. What about Qt?