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by Kipters 3129 days ago
I may be biased since I've been working with Xamarin since 2013, but I fail to see how Flutter could be a better choice than Xamarin:

- the language is a niche compared to C# (which translates in "it's harder to hire devs")

- it's less mature (both the framework and the language)

- most importantly, Flutter uses its own set of controls that look like the native ones, while Xamarin uses the platform's native controls.

Can someone please fill in what are the advantages of Flutter?

2 comments

For what it's worth, as a long-time Java programmer I found it very easy to pick up Dart. I was porting a Java program and found I could copy and paste the Java code into my Dart app, then fix the compile errors (mostly by deleting the verbose scaffolding that Java requires). If I was scaling up a project written in Dart I would just hire strong Java programmers and expect them to get up to speed with Dart pretty quickly.
Does Xamarin have native UI widgets not just basic components?

ReactNative has native controls but most are just basic. Flutter has material/ios widgets built in which simplifies develpoment. I like flutters declarative syntax similar to reactjs. But its still in alpha hence can't commit much time to it.

In addition to what m_fayer says, you can also bind native libs and make the same adjustments, so most native controls written in Objective-C or Java are basically drop-in (bindings are already available for most common components on NuGet, but they're almost trivial to write)

Binding Swift libraries is a pain though

Xamarin just binds the native UI framework and makes some tweaks to adjust it to C# conventions, so you can use the same APIs that native developers use.