[winrid]

Nothing beats native.

2nd best is what you know.

I'm using egui right now for quickly putting together a native cross platform tool. For a startup, again I'd pick what you know. RN and Flutter will provide similar experiences for most apps. Flutter will perform better with charts etc.

[Grimburger]

I'm a massive egui fan but I don't think you properly compare an immediate mode framework to the retained mode behemoths of Flutter or React Native.

Mobile is ruled out. Some very basic things people take for granted like flex layouts are also incredibly hard to do right.

They have different use cases. That said, I love egui and have built a bunch of in-house tooling with it, such a joy to work with and uses barely any resources despite being immediate mode.

[winrid]

Actually I wouldn't call Flutter and React retained mode. They're basically fancy immediate mode. That's why React is so productive.

Flutter looks to be the same. Even google's docs say (paraphrasing) "isn't doing the layout every frame slow? No, because the runtime is optimized".

Not suggesting using egui btw, just off handed mention. :)

[fakedang]

Sorry, time to market is important. What's important is getting your product out the front door, then iterating as you go on.

[TechBro8615]

The problem with native is you need to write everything twice, and that's if you only want to support Android and iOS. Of course you can start by targeting just one platform, but then God forbid people actually like your app, everyone starts asking when it's coming to the other platform and you buckle under the pressure of recoding the same app and somehow avoiding all your technical debt from the first one.

If you have a team with 2+ devs, and maybe some actual users, then go for it. But are there any examples of single developers publishing an app cross platform, written natively for each?

[winrid]

QT is also really great, depending on what your app is.

[lockhouse]

As an end user, Qt apps do not feel particularly great. There’s just a lot of weird behavior in them and they just really feel off. At least that’s how the official demos from the Qt Company feel. I’m not sure how a real production level app feels. I’m not aware of any major apps that use it.

[winrid]

Interesting. A lot of open source software uses it via the python bindings. What do you mean by feels? Slow? Look? Layout? Isn't it all os-native widgets?

[lockhouse]

On mobile I don’t believe it uses native widgets. I think the official Qt Company demos are done with Qt Quick. They just look off, the rendering of the controls isn’t quite right and some of them don’t handle screen rotation well.

It’s been a while since I’ve tried them though, maybe it’s improved but about a year or 2 ago I wasn’t impressed.

[winrid]

Yeah QT Quick is not using native widgets. If you use native qt components then it uses native widgets cross platform.

I think they do the demos in qt quick to appeal to auto makers.