[HillRat]

My former firm put a lot of effort into Flutter as a preferred alternative to RN or native app dev -- including standing up a lot of onshore/nearshore/offshore experience -- but we never were able to to make it a viable alternative on anything other than small or trivial apps, due generally to performance problems, weird iOS corner cases, hard-to-debug crashes arising from deep within the framework, and sharp edges on their emulated components. From a governance perspective, we ran into difficulty rapidly spinning up new dev capacity relative to RN (where you can have a web developer productive within a few days, as long as they've got a mobile dev running their pod to oversee integration and build). I'd love to see Flutter become a strong alternative, but I'm not sure Google is willing to drop enough of its NIH syndrome to meet developers where they are, rather than where they want devs to be; until then, it's a tech to push further out on the radar until it's more battle-tested, especially on iOS.

[enos_feedler]

While Flutter and RN might be improving in many ways, it feels like the risk/reward tradeoff is actually getting worse for using a unified app layer. The underlying platforms getting easier to use themselves (Kotlin, Swift, SwiftUI, Jetback, etc) and the developer market getting stronger skill-wise at developer apps. There is more of a consolidation of best practices etc. The reward for building a single codebase becomes very low, but the risk is remaining high. You are adding a layer of indirection and dependency right in the middle of the platform. You basically cannot evolve at the speed of the platform. Sometimes platforms move fast and you want to capitalize on change. This always made it seem like non-starter for me.

[nsonha]

there are developers who are just happy to write the same logic in multiple languages, and there are those who find it extremely mind-boggling, this is regardless of how nice/easy to learn those languages are.

[enos_feedler]

Nobody is happy to write the same logic in multiple languages. There are other ways to package logic and have it be consumable by multiple teams building native mobile apps for various platforms. If you are trying to solve this by very specific problem by adopting something like React Native or Flutter then I would question many other things beyond this.

[nsonha]

> There are other ways to package logic and have it be consumable by multiple team

Really what way? Make a backend endpoint? Convert to C++ and invoke as native code? I'm only speaking for react native it's more than sharing code it's sharing skill, a web/nodejs dev can learn it and jump on company's mobile app when needed, as opposed to have dedicated devs for Android and iOS who sit around doing nothing sometimes and stop company from shipping when they go on vacation.

[enos_feedler]

I can understand for combersome shared logic.

[travisgriggs]

This mirrors our experience as well.