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- Hacker News
- I vouch for Flutter over React Native; we built https://macrocodex.app/ with 16,000+ users already!
And it's completely free no ads, no subscriptions, or donations, for the public benefit of improving health and fitness.
It's a guaranteed weight loss or gain app; results within 2-5 weeks! Don't believe? well just read reviews. We do not have Revenue, so no money to spend on marketing.
OK so that's brief description of what we built now flutter part:
The Flutter development experience is very smooth; you rarely run into any issues, just be careful not to block the UI isolate. Sometimes bad structuring issues or ui bugs may end up blocking your UI.
My experience is in Backend (java, rust, c++, go, ruby, python etc..) and this is the first time i built a mobile app. And same is true for other guys on the team.
Some limitations are from the underlying platform and not Flutter. Initially, I thought the lack of OTA was a dealbreaker (as App Store / Play Store approvals are a slow loop) and Expo might be better, but the lack of OTA made me structure the app differently and it turned out it's not as big of a deal actually.
We also managed to have a PWA app (for nearly free) by using Flutter web, so it also runs on devices which do not support the Play Store or App Store, giving us max coverage across the board.
We tested react native but found it slow (your code runs in Hermes VM so you need to write native code to offload) and dev tools aren't as good as flutters imho. Dart AOT, which is what runs on iOS/Android, is much faster by default, so you'll hardly ever feel any need to write native code. And when you do need to write native code, we use some for WorkManager and HealthConnect it's very easy! Just be careful with R8; you might have to set rules (though most plugins ship with rules these days) but if you are writing native code in java/kotlin you may have to do this on your own, or it can sometimes break things!
I am glad I picked Flutter over React Native! I had my doubts, but I am glad I looked at their "architecture" rather than the hype of the subreddits.
- I wanted to love flutter. It’s just so hard to commit to anything like this Google makes without a full expectation of getting rug pulled.by phoghed
- As someone coming from MacroFactor, estimating macros on food is the hardest part of dieting. So your app is great but it tackles the part of dieting that people aren't stuggling with and doesn't address the part that they do struggle with.
Most dieting apps are pushing for the AI photo and barcode scanning to make estimating easier and though far from perfect, it makes the whole experience at least somewhat doable.
by alternatex - I'll second this. I avoided React Native because I absolutely loathe using React in general (much prefer Vue/Nuxt or Svelte/SvelteKit). Flutter has been an absolute pleasure to build the mobile version of https://miserablyunemployed.com with. It's all really straightforward and I haven't experienced any real gotchas yet.by ramijames
- The one thing I hate about flutter is the ui code having an ungodly amount of nested brackets.by kumarvvr
- You clearly need more Lispmaxxing
- Loc goes brrrrrrr. The tokenmaxxing of the 20sby superze
- For some reason I prefer those to curlies.by skeledrew
- While you aren't wrong, in my experience when the amount of nesting starts giving me bad vibes it usually indicates that something can be refactored out as a standalone widget.
Still, Flutter now feels ancient to use compared to something like Compose, in that regard.
by MrDresden - I treat nesting as a feature: if the nesting starts getting deep, that's the code indicating to extract a child widget. It pushes me toward better composition and smaller, reusable components instead of giant monolithic views.by gman83
- great for mobile apps, fine for desktops, basically unusable for browsers unless you do wasm, if web can be revamped/improved it can be the best option for cross platform GUIby synergy20
- no one and absolutely no one pick flutter because they want do traditional web in the first place
its a cross platform framework that you can share component between mobile and other platform and always has been
by tonyhart7 - > basically unusable for browsers unless you do wasm
Relying on WASM means that nobody on Apple platforms who has Lockdown Mode enabled for better security will be able to use it.
by JimDabell - You are in luck then, use jaspr.by eklavya
- Tested lots of flutter desktop apps on Github last year. All have sluggish animation. FPS rarely reached 60.by feverzsj
- I do more mobile/web Flutter dev so haven't got experience here but I'm surprised to hear that. Can you name some examples?by thelollies
- Debug mode?by britannio
- Decoupling material and cupertino makes a lot of sense.by Aldo_MX
- Yes, hopefully now that this decoupling is complete, they'll actually start being updated again. The progress was a bit stalled while this process was ongoing.by gman83
- Are Flutter and React Native still viable choices today?
I get the impression that more are going for native mobile, KMP or PWA.
by TheChaplain - I’ve been a React Native developer for 8 years, I’ve written many apps with it professionally and personally. Until recently, I would have recommended it wholeheartedly.
This weekend I had an idea I set out to experiment with: if I have an existing React Native app, how much effort would it take an LLM to rewrite it into genuinely native apps. My idea being I no longer need to write cross-platform code and pay the intermediary framework costs, I’d get direct access to the underlying platform. Instead, I could just spec the features I need in the app and the LLM can build it.
It took me a year to build the original app to production quality by hand. My “twins”, as they’ve become known, were at 80% completion in three days of on-off work.
I’m pretty much convinced my experiment was a success. Which sorta terrifies me that I’ve specialised in a technology that can be, for all intents and purposes, be entirely erased.
The only caveat I can find is it is still a great technology for doing cross-platform mobile and web. Using something like Tamagui (as rough as that can be sometimes) allows genuine code sharing across all platforms.
Sucks most that I’m now actively looking for a new React Native role.
by wwdrew - Every time we tried it, it resulted in a worse experience than we knew could be done using native stacks. It is like using sand as a foundation for your house. Random version updates break random things. As soon as you need something a bit advanced on the platform, you are stuck with some barely supported library. Easy to start, hard to maintain and hard to ship a solid product.by rapsey
- Flutter is quite good for shipping quickly and a set of decent same/similar apps. You lose some "quality" and a lot of "native performance" and feel (yes, that's important distinction here. So the usage, if still it will be used, will be limited to that I believe.
KMP I guess missed the ship and that ship has sailed quite deep into the ocean now. PWA won't be a choice anymore except for the "niche" usage.
React Native? I guess there will be use cases for this (at least for a while) as it is deeply entrenched into too many apps and many of those are very famous apps. Besides there's always been automasochism for the reason to pick react native.. so that's there :D
I will also expect native to pickup now (unless we only see single person tech teams now) because of AI. I mean as LLMs started getting better at coding my first thought as a native dev was - hah, hopefully people won't have to deal with such monstrosities in even small teams now.
Also, not having to see a package.json with a trillion entries (and counting) alone can put all these choices above RN for me.
- We use flutter at work. When you need to target various platforms for the same code base it's extremely competent.by keyle
- I've built apps with millions of users using flutter. Quicker, faster and easier for building cross-platform apps if you know what you are doing.
This is coming from a native framework evangelist for many years, and then just tried flutter early days (which was far more difficult than how easy it is today). Now I write almost all my projects in flutter/dart where I can, especially with AI the speed from idea to production is insane.
by mad_tortoise - Flutter: if you want a pixel perfect version of your app that looks similar on Android and iOS. Some quite popular apps use it and make a shit ton of money, for example Headspace. More here: https://flutterhunt.com/
React Native: totally viable, because core business logic is the same. If you want native UI elements and all the iOS Liquid Glass stuff, but don’t want to have to completely separate code based, React Native is a viable option if you don’t mind installing lots of third party packages for functionality you get out of the box in Flutter or true native apps.
Native mobile: I have one smaller app with quite a custom calendar view, written with Claude Code natively for Android and iOS. Coding agents help and you get maximum control. Mentally, it’s a bit cumbersome to direct you agent to do everything twice. While one platform can serve as a reference implementation for the other, it’s kinda annoying mentally "to do the same feature all over again and test and direct the agent". But it’s doable.
KMP: No experience, I just hate most things around Android.
PWA: That ship has sailed. Nobody knows about PWAs, most PWAs are bad. It’s a bummer really.
Capacitor: make an SPA (offline-first preferably), and use native code plugins via Capacitor. Still quite feasible, comparable to Flutter in the sense that you need to build a custom UI or use a fake version of Liquid Glass and Material. I use Ionic for that, but it’s a bit dated (still on Material v2). Heavily depends on your skills as a web dev to get good UX.
by WA - Very happy that it's still maintain, because that's the only real framework that allow an easy dev for a decently fast app with one code base that works on linux, windows, mac, ios and android at once.
It's super nice.
by BiteCode_dev - Oh finally multi-window support - I might finally be able to flutter for a simple desktop app side project I've been wanting to build.by Humphrey
- Of all the myriad projects from Google, how is Flutter/Dart the one that survived the axe? I’m not saying I hate them - I think they’re both really neat - I just don’t understand why Google keeps these limping along with weak support and no clear vision within their broader web ecosystem.by jimbob45
- In one of their dev surveys, they did float the idea of divesting Flutter.by Scene_Cast2