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by krzat 2507 days ago
The strength of Flutter is it's architecture. Nothing comes close. Web is too slow. Xamarin/React Native is too restricted by native layer. Qt is C++.

Popularity of Flutter increases steadily: https://trends.google.pl/trends/explore?cat=31&date=today%20...

4 comments

IMHO the architecture is actually it's weakness. I know a lot of Android developers who don't want to go near it because they have to give up a lot (language, nice frameworks, etc.). Marying Flutter to Dart in an age where everything has been trending towards LLVM based compiler tool chains on native for well over a decade seems misguided.

Yet Flutter fills an important gap in the market: pure native experiences are slowly dying because native look and feel is increasingly meaningless now that so many apps use non native UI kits. Also, supporting multiple UI teams developing for different platforms is a huge risk for small companies and a lot of hassle even for those teams that can afford it. We need more cross platform stuff but I don't believe Flutter is the solution here because of its architecture, which is a combination of "our way or the highway" and vendor lock in. I'd say there is a big risk of Apple doing something smart with Swift on Android and web. I actually know of a few Android developers using Swift on Android already. This is becoming a thing. Like Kotlin, Swift is perfectly positioned to start targeting cross platform via LLVM. Also WASM is becoming a thing. IMHO, Google needs to make U turn here and rip out whatever it is that prevents Flutter from being driven from Kotlin (jvm and native) and other llvm languages.

All that's missing is a proper cross platform UI toolkit that actually works properly in that ecosystem. Things like QT and GTK are obviously usable in that space but a bit clunky/ugly on mobile.

Yeah right, as if Common Lisp and Smalltalk, or the myriad of 90's 4GLs never happened.

Popularity does not translate in money nor projects, specially with a niche language designed for doing UIs only, lacking libraries left and right.

Nativescript is more powerful than React Native because it gives you direct access to the JAVA/Objective C libraries if you need it.

I reviewed Flutter but got put off by the levels of abstraction.

How can you be interested in RN if Flutter is too abstract?
Does someone know what the state of the RN rearchitecture effort is? And is there likely going to be a smooth upgrade path forward without much breakage across the ecosystem?