[muzani]

Dart and Flutter were actually meant to be the better design. Lots of features from those were replicated on Kotlin-Jetpack, especially Compose. And lots of those features end up being copied to Java.

Dart-Flutter still supports them better natively though, instead of having to hack things like reactive programming via Kotlin Flow.

[rstat1]

Flutter is at best no different IMO, as now not only do you have to deal with Flutter's build system for Dart, you also have to deal with Kotlin/the default Android build system when you want to do something not supported by the Flutter std libs, which last I tried was quite a lot. That was a few years back though so maybe its changed (though I doubt it). Jetpack Compose is similar in its "not much better"-ness to me.

I can't remember if it was Compose or Flutter, where I spent a ridiculous amount of time trying to get something to stay centered on the screen regardless of orientation. Something that I could do pretty easily and quickly with my own UI tech library in C++. However I can't use that code without having to jump through all the annoying hoops you have to jump through with JNI crap in order to use it. So I just don't bother with Android anymore.

[cageface]

Flutter is quite good now. Performance is actually better than SwiftUI out of the box and the ecosystem and tooling is mature.

Unfortunately with all the short-sighted cost cutting Google has been doing lately it's even harder to have faith that they won't axe it sometime soon.

[mikhael28]

Centering a widget regardless of orientation (and detecting the orientation) is incredibly trivial with Flutter. You might have just been tired at the end of a long day and missed something.

[muzani]

Yeah, my thought was it was someone unfamiliar with mobile measurements. It's meant to handle mobile UIs, which means "pixel" doesn't exist as measurement because screens are different densities, different aspect ratio. You could do a thing like make an empty block with full padding to the left or right, or just center align it.

I made a mobile game in Ren'Py and it was hard for me because of the fixed assumption that something was 800x600 and such and you'd add padding on the sides lol. Unfortunately with mobile, everything is relative to each other. iOS was a little easier back when it was one size, but now it's not.

It's still a lot easier to do than fixing sizes on CSS, flexbox, etc because you'd be able to have fine control over these things.

[rstat1]

Now that I've thought about for a bit it was Compose I had that issue with.

I really just wish the Android group would get over their apparent disdain for native code and just let me write my app in C++ without having to deal with JNI BS.