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by tobyhede 1930 days ago
Flutter is not for everything, but it is really worth a look.

We (AU MVNO/Telco) recently converted iOS and Android apps (200,000 MAUs) to Flutter and it has been game changing. We had experimented with react native and found it just didn't deliver. Flutter is different. On mobile platforms the experience is super responsive and smooth and for your typical consumer app indistinguishable from the native experience. The tooling and developer experience are incredible. The benefits and experience where so clear that the whole team was onboard - including the most die-hard career platform specialists. Our velocity and ability to deliver is measurably better.

We're looking at the web target as maybe "good enough". I don't think it could be a replacement for a well-crafted web app, but could be used to provide a fast alternative to the primary native experience, and for rapidly prototyping and experimenting. In the current state, Flutter Web could never replace our highly optimised ecommerce funnel - some things you just need to sweat the details. But it's definitely better than some of the CX in the corners of our legacy applications. Shipping fast is valuable - so build for native, get a good enough web for "free" and then spend time and attention on the web if it is warranted.
2 comments
nsainsbury 1930 days ago
From what I've seen and has been confirmed quite a few times now Flutter definitely does not deliver on producing mobile apps that are "super responsive and...indistinguishable from the native experience"

You can even find the director of engineering for Flutter confirming that's not the case on a thread on Reddit along with numerous devs reporting being burned by Flutter and swearing off using it ever again: https://www.reddit.com/r/FlutterDev/comments/llmkd4/ios_jank...

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tobyhede 1929 days ago
What can I say? As with all things, YMMV. We're happy with it, we launched with zero customer impact, and have had no issues. Perceived performance has increased.
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heavyset_go 1930 days ago
> We had experimented with react native and found it just didn't deliver

Can you expound on why you found that React Native didn't deliver?

I've played with Flutter a couple of years ago, and I'm revisiting it and React Native before building an app on a one person team.

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tobyhede 1929 days ago
Performance in some areas was an issue. Overall benefits productivity and ongoing maintenance weren't enough to be really worth it. There is nuance to it all, because some of it lies in team structure and knowledge as well.
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