[wahnfrieden]

Swift on WASM also got very good last year. SQLite in WASM too.

Flutter is still bad on iOS and macOS. No Liquid Glass (except some weird hack attempts that look and behave badly). Liquid Glass isn't an optional decoration, it's the name of the new system-wide UI. Leaving it out of your app is like committing to iOS 6-era skeuomorphic design after iOS 7.

Edit: Several cross-platforms frameworks can do Liquid Glass:

- SwiftUI by using Skip for Android

- SwiftCrossUI

- React Native

I'm glad to see that I can finally target iOS as the first-class citizen, using Apple technologies, and then run that code on other platforms. Instead of having to use frameworks that treat iOS as secondary when it is by far the biggest money-maker for most apps.

[cageface]

I’ve had very good experiences with Flutter on iOS and macOS. It’s actually a lot easier to get good performance in Flutter than SwiftUI.

No cross platform stack can do Liquid Glass yet. You have to wonder if that was one of design goals.

[gumby271]

I'm pretty well convinced it was a goal too. If it wasn't then shame on them since it doesn't accomplish anything else well.

[d12bb]

It’s nice developer experience indeed. But for me as a user, I hate it. Looks nothing like an iOS app, often even worse than fckng webviews…

[wahnfrieden]

All those approximations at Liquid Glass are infuriating to use and make every app that does feel cheap and gross

[dangus]

> Liquid Glass isn't an optional decoration, it's the name of the new system-wide UI

Of course it’s optional. Some of the most popular apps on the planet ignore the local UI conventions of their parent OSes entirely.

TikTok is a Flutter app. It looks identical on iOS and Android. It uses basically no native UI elements.

It’s a pretty well-known strategy to create apps that look identical on all platforms so that you lessen your customer confusion and your support burden. The fact that Spotify, Facebook, Uber, and Reddit look exactly the same no matter what platform you’re on is more important than complying with OS design guidelines and UI elements.

[d12bb]

> Spotify, Facebook, Uber, and Reddit

And I hate every one of those apps (well, back when I used Facebook, years ago, I did), because they’re just bad iOS citizens. I, as most iOS users do, don’t care what apps look on Android. For Android users, it’s the same with iOS. Making shitty cross platform apps is all about branding and saving some money for developers, nothing about the users.

[dangus]

It’s cool that you are a non-conformist badass but their wild popularity proves that a native app experience doesn’t matter.

What does “bad iOS citizen” even mean?

It’s not even about saving money for developers, it’s about the fact that your users expect a consistent experience.

Imagine if you watched an NFL game on NBC and the on-screen graphics were different if you were watching on a Samsung TV versus an LG TV. That’s the issue with native app UI elements (and it would quite literally be an issue with content apps on smart TV app platforms which are way more fragmented than iOS versus Android).

[d12bb]

Your conclusion is false, as you’re mixing stuff that shouldn’t be mixed here:

1. Spotify, Uber etc are popular because of their product, not the pure quality of their apps. People use Uber because they want to cheaply get somewhere, and Spotify cause that’s there all their shared playlists are.

2. People buy whatever tv is on sale when their old one breaks, but the vast majority will stay with their phone platform, so couldn’t care less what their apps look on the other platforms out there.

So, native experience does matter, but obviously only as one of multiple deciding factors.

> What does “bad iOS citizen” even mean?

Doesn’t look like native apps, doesn’t feel like native apps (come on, most multi platform frameworks don’t even get the scrolling right, one of the most basic forms of interaction), doesn’t use all of the platforms features to their fullest, as applicable for the type of app.

[wahnfrieden]

What I meant to say in my original message is that if you are using system default-ish iOS UI styling, Liquid Glass is not optional decoration. If you have your entirely own UI and design system, sure you don't need it. But many of these Flutter apps or other such toolkits are using it to approximate system default UI except either without the Liquid Glass parts or with uncanny and incomplete approximations of it.

[neonmagenta]

Exactly. Branding and UX are breaking out of the box for guidelines in the successful platforms. You want to be able to pick up any device and have the user know exactly what theyre doing

[wiseowise]

Thank God I’m only using web versions whenever possible.

[dangus]

Which also have consistent branding and UX with the apps.

[wiseowise]

That's fine, as long as I have native OS dialogs/settings.

[uripont]

I thought TikTok used native implementations and Lynx (their cross-platform framework)

[dangus]

I dunno, the ByteDance logo is on the Flutter web page.

But it really doesn’t matter either way. The point is that TikTok doesn’t follow any OS conventions.

[satvikpendem]

> Edit: Several cross-platforms frameworks can do Liquid Glass:

This is pretty funny because you just listed SwiftUI three times but in different configurations. They're not truly cross platform, they just wrap Apple's native design code. In contrast, I can (and do) use a package like liquid_glass_renderer to get Liquid Glass everywhere, on all my devices, with one codebase.

[wahnfrieden]

If this is the current state of it, I can spot a dozen details that are wrong or missing: https://x.com/imadetheseworks/status/1973765948218941771/vid...

Maybe it will get there... Meanwhile I would rather use technologies that provide the full experience on the platform where it matters, and would never want those liquid components on platforms like Android or Windows anyway.

[satvikpendem]

Well, the library is literally 3 months old, and it's made by one person as an OSS package, so yes, I'm sure you can spot those wrong details. Still, it'll get there, especially once Flutter gets official support for Liquid Glass, as they are planning on working on it later this year or into next year, currently they are refactoring their current design library code.

> and would never want those liquid components on platforms like Android or Windows anyway.

That's where we disagree then, I like the design itself but don't like it stuck on only one platform. I make apps with wholly custom UI designs, not following any particular OS' "native" design, and that's why Flutter is so powerful, because I am not constrained to what pixels I can render to a screen, nor should I be.

[websiteapi]

in my experience wasm on web, though it works, has too slow a first page load time for slow connections.

[wahnfrieden]

Embedded Swift WASM is very small now. But it is still behind on some useful capabilities like having a replacement for Codable (which last I read may be getting a more performant replacement). Regular Swift WASM got a lot smaller too last year though.

[websiteapi]

interesting - do you have a good example of a non-trivial web app that uses swift wasm?

[wahnfrieden]

Goodnotes