[agentifysh]

This is a welcome addition but why should Flutter devs use this ?

Seems like it requires 32gb of ram! Also Flutter is already very mature and can produce not only near-native mobile apps (the difference is almost negligible) but can target desktop and even web applications.

I do wonder how much of a boost skip offers vs Flutter's mobile apps. Will give skip a try when dram prices normalize.

[marcprux]

See my response below on the KMP question: the comparison with CMP mostly applies to Flutter as well.

> near-native mobile apps (the difference is almost negligible)

Not as of the advent of Liquid Glass on iOS (and, to a lesser extent, Material Expressive on Android). Flutter isn't going to be implementing these new interface conventions[1], and so the UI for these apps are stuck on the last generation and are already starting to feel outdated.

Flutter's grim outlook has resulted in a surge of interest in Skip, and it was one of the drivers for us to open up the platform and catch the wave. If you love Dart, or if your apps don't need to look native (e.g., games or very bespoke interfaces), then Flutter might continue to be acceptable. But everyone else is starting to look elsewhere, especially in cases where their business depends on their apps feeling premium and native.

[1] https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/170310

[IshKebab]

> Flutter isn't going to be implementing these new interface conventions

To be fair reading those updates it sounds a lot more positive than this comment makes it seem. I.e. "they're pausing design updates while they figure out the best way to do it" rather than "they're not going to bother":

> This strategic pause on design updates gives us the space to ensure the long-term health and maintainability of Flutter's design libraries. We are committed to being transparent with our contributor community as we explore these options and will have more to share on our findings and future direction in the coming weeks.

and

> The material and cupertino libraries are being decoupled into standalone packages to accelerate feature development. All new work for iOS26 updates in Cupertino will happen in the new packages once established in flutter/packages.

[satvikpendem]

Flutter's grim outlook? It's being used more now than ever before, with both enterprise use as well as 30% of all new free iOS app store apps are now using Flutter.

https://shorebird.dev/blog/flutter-not-dead/

[gman83]

Flutter is undergoing a major refactor where they're decoupling Material and Cupertino into separate packages. This is the reason why they're not implementing those new conventions right away. The way you've framed it is pretty disingenuous.

[marcprux]

It really isn't. Did you see their latest time estimate (https://youtu.be/W4olXg91iX8?t=538)? Late 2026 just to get the widget sets broken out into separate packages? And only then can they start considering modernizing them and trying to mimic the latest UI?

Flutter can't even get animations to look and feel right for iOS 18 and below (read through this thread and every other HN/Reddit thread that mentions Flutter vs. native components). Do you really think they'll ever get Liquid Glass looking and feeling convincing, let alone performing acceptably?

Read over the 100+ comments in the GH issue I posted. You see actual Flutter contributors — not people who merely vibe-coded a Potemkin L.G. demo and declared victory — saying that it is effectively impossible.

[holoduke]

Well sorry. But Android UI is bad just bad. The settings, the menus. Its bloated and almost as if they deliberately made it annoying to use. It just sucks.

[sofixa]

Have you seen iOS or macOS settings, like ever? Especially on macOS, the UI is infantile, you have settings in different menus that change each other (mouse / touchpad scroll direction, two buttons in two menus, they change each other). On iOS you have amazing features like a wheel spinning forever without telling you there is a problem and what it is (like, for an app with in-app purchases, you must have a payment configured, otherwise the app installation just spins forever).

Compared to that, my (OxygenOS version of) Android UI is pretty good, concise, flexible and customisable if I want to. I hate the ambiguity of gestures, so I keep the buttons for navigation. I don't want everything splattered on the home screen, so I use a different launcher than the default. The menus are all logical.

[skavi]

Dunno about Skip, but I can always tell when an app is Flutter. They feel like crap. Everything's a bit off with the native looking widgets. And fully custom designs still animate a bit weirdly. And they definitely still stutter. Somehow a tier below React Native.

[winrid]

Flutter re-generates the entire layout every tick and diffs it (immediate-mode), like a game engine. If your device isn't quite fast enough it'll lag, yep. RN is retained mode (but written in immediate-mode style and the diffing only happens when it has to).

[matt_kn]

That is absolutely not true. Elements with dirty layouts are tracked and layout is only recomputed up to the neearest layout boundary.

[winrid]

Weird, it looks like you're right but I recall their early marketing saying stuff like just rebuild the whole layout, it's cheap since it's compiled. They must have meant it's cheap to rebuild as needed haha

[realusername]

I'd say it's the opposite, on crappy devices, Flutter feels faster than native, not sure how but that's the end result. I've been testing on an old Samsung J3 and it's definitely better than native.

That's also maybe why it's so popular in India.

[agentifysh]

Flutter is essentially a game engine so it bypasses the typical cycles involved with native widgets and there are several different ways why Flutter works well on lower end phones

[SoKamil]

Interesting, I didn’t know that it was immediate mode. According to the article [1] though, it now uses rendering engine with Retained Mode due to performance issues.

[1] https://medium.com/@0s.and.1s/flutter-part-iv-skia-vs-impell...

[winrid]

ah neat, so they rewrote the rendering engine in C++ and exposed it via Dart APIs, as opposed to everything being in Dart.

[matt_kn]

It has been like that since the very beginning (sky engine).

[duskdozer]

I've noticed several of the apps that don't respect device animation settings were built with Flutter. Not sure if that's a limitation of it or if the developers culturally don't bother.

[well_ackshually]

Flutter is fine if you don't care about performance, accessibility, have no need to access native capabilities or non-fluttered widgets (ex: the Google map integration is awful) and overall just want to make an internal app.

The cost of making an excellent flutter app is about the same you'd pay making fully native apps. Except that you're always paying for Skia's costs with Flutter.

This recommends 32GB to run _everything_, so xcode, gradle, emulators, simulators, etc. Not fully surprising.

[doodlesdev]

Flutter doesn't use Skia anymore and you can absolutely bind to native libraries from Flutter with ease [0]. The current strategy (build hooks) is relatively new. You can also just write Kotlin or Swift for your application [1] using channel APIs. Finally, you can still have native pages in your app if needed for certain widgets [2] and still save time rewriting everything and all of your business logic for every single other page of the application that doesn't need those widgets. In fact, you can even mix native widgets and Flutter-rendered widgets in the same screen.

[0]: https://docs.flutter.dev/platform-integration/bind-native-co...

[1]: https://docs.flutter.dev/platform-integration/platform-chann...

[2]: https://docs.flutter.dev/add-to-app

[x0x0]

And are comfortable making a 1-2 million dollar per devteam per year bet that Google won't rug pull you. And they seem to have no important or big app on it.

On an unrelated note, in 2024 Google did layoffs on the Flutter team.

[satvikpendem]

https://shorebird.dev/blog/flutter-not-dead/

Also, the layoffs were for infrastructure engineers who were working on Flutter builds not actual core Flutter devs. And the layoff was just an offshoring, they moved the same jobs from the US to Europe.

[eseidel]

Former Flutter Director, Shorebird founder here. Yes, that matches my understanding. The layoffs happened after I left Google, but yes Google appears to have simply off-shored the infrastructure (build and release) team.

[x0x0]

That article answers a question nobody had while lying to conflate the poor answer with what people actually want to know.

The question isn't if Flutter is dead. It's (1) will Google continue to invest resources to maintain it (and note they could easily make their commitment firm, and have chosen not to do so for obvious reasons: they value the optionality to stop support); and (2) if Google were to reduce/end support, is there enough community, and by community we really mean companies with investments they can't walk away from, to take over maintenance and ongoing development to maintain it as an sdk that can target the evolving platforms.

So whether Whirlpool or Toyota use Flutter is entirely irrelevant. You can maintain in-car systems on private code, evidenced by how that was historically done. Toyota using this as their sdk for in-car whatever doesn't help someone whose problem is they need Flutter to work well on ios/android.

Whirlpool building an ecommerce app for Brazil... golf clap. Same as MGM's app. Small teams built those; small teams can build new ones. who cares.

Even citing the whirlpool app, which is (link followed) actually this:

https://flutter.dev/showcase/whirlpool

built by a small outsourced company makes clear how thin the support actually is. Suppose google drops support: how many ft engineers is Whirlpool going to pay to maintain Flutter as a first-class deploy target? I'd bet zero.

There's nobody like, just for example, Shopify with a multi-billion dollar commitment and a history of open source work who has an investment they're stuck with. or Facebook. Google's internal ads doesn't count: they already Angular'd people. They're perfectly capable of maintaining that as a one-off internal sdk.

They don't use it for gmail/maps. Or anything where the migration costs start with a B.

[elemdos]

That sounds like the worst parts of native dev + PWAs combined

[agentifysh]

What?! Flutter is literally a game engine, its faster than native even on older phones and pretty much most of the issues you are talking about is old news lol

[trevor-e]

Flutter still doesn't support liquid glass on iOS so it doesn't seem like a serious contender to me at this point. And due to the nature of how Flutter is implemented, it's going to continuously be an uphill battle. Maybe it's fine if you intend on having a completely custom UI and don't care about platform look and feel.

[eptcyka]

> Flutter still doesn't support liquid glass on iOS

Literally every iOS developer under the sun will tell me that this is a good thing.

[daveidol]

Why? I'm an iOS developer and, while I don't love everything about liquid glass, that is the current design language of iOS.

I certainly don't think having my app sticking out like a sore thumb, using a design language from old outdated iOS versions is "a good thing"

[WA]

The new direction isn’t Liquid Glass, but a more unified branding across Android and iOS. WhatsApp, Google Maps, Instagram, Netflix, Prime Video, and many others don’t look dated, because they don’t make heavy use of the older iOS design language at all.

[frizlab]

No. I’m an iOS developer and will not tell you that, except to say it’s a good thing to have one more reason for the people not to use flutter.

[lawgimenez]

That’s not a good thing if you don’t adapt liquid glass. I’m an iOS developer.

[cosmic_cheese]

In general, the "render UI as if it were a video game" route feels like a bit of a dead end on mobile to me. On desktop it's more workable but still isn't without issues.

[skybrian]

I've heard bad things about liquid glass and plan to skip that OS release, so not implementing it seems like an advantage from my perspective.

[msie]

Tried using Flutter a year ago to make a simple Mac app. I don't think it was ready at the time. Also poor documentation.