I've been pretty happy with the overall Flutter development experience and don't quite understand why so many people dislike the ecosystem. You don't get full native UI, but a lot of the widgets adapt to the platform conventions accordingly without you having to do anything special (things like formatting structure and icons for AppBar navigation, etc.). Being able to compile my pure Dart lib into JavaScript has been useful for implementing a web version without having to use the normal Flutter stack.
I'm looking forward to the deeper multi-window support on desktop, as I've been largely avoiding adding support outside of mobile until now.
My reason for disliking the Flutter ecosystem is that they massively oversell its web support, grossly misleading.
They have from the start portrayed Flutter Web as a sane choice for web apps; whereas it is in fact an appalling abomination painful to use. If your alternative was only making a mobile app, Flutter Web may be better than nothing, but (for targeting the web) you should never choose it for anything beyond games; yet they act as though it’s perfectly good and reasonable.
They used to have a DOM renderer, which was a little dodgy in implementation but overall a reasonable approach; but then they got rid of it some years ago rather than fixing it, doubling down on the pure-canvas approach where it is fundamentally impossible to get good results for pretty much anything beyond games.
They have improved things a little: https://flutter.dev/development/web#:~:text=Less%20ideal%20use%20cases does finally at least call Flutter Web “less ideal” for some use cases. But I’d say most of their “ideal use cases” are still very unsuitable, and their “less ideal” ones are all utterly inappropriate.
They’ve made a new demo now, https://wonderous.app/web/. So painful. Scrolling is atrocious (it’s not possible to implement scrolling acceptably without using real DOM elements, even if invisible), latency dreadful (the browser is a compositor: that’s also why you need to use a real scrolling area), performance abominable (maybe 20fps on my 5800HS laptop, roughly top-of-the-line for six years ago), things that should be links aren’t, and it doesn’t respect my chosen fonts because it implements the rendering entirely itself.
Given that they handle my area of expertise so very persistently very badly, while persistently claiming there is no problem, why would I think they’re doing better elsewhere? The impression I get is that it’s essentially Android-native and always foreign look-and-feel on all other platforms.
You don't get full native UI, but a lot of the widgets adapt to the platform conventions
That’s why. These cross-platform toolkits try to be native widgets without actually being native widgets, and one can always tell. Either because it just feels wrong or because one knows how it fails to be like native, i.e. why it feels wrong.
Dart looks like an interesting language and Flutter is most likely nicer than a pile of different stacks, when you're a small team. At my previous job we did consider it for an application but didn't go with it because we didn't trust Google to maintain it long term. Maybe there's hope yet =)
Great to see these changes! UI design in Flutter was something I always struggled with, especially when trying to make an app look good on iOS and Android
elasticdog | a day ago
I've been pretty happy with the overall Flutter development experience and don't quite understand why so many people dislike the ecosystem. You don't get full native UI, but a lot of the widgets adapt to the platform conventions accordingly without you having to do anything special (things like formatting structure and icons for AppBar navigation, etc.). Being able to compile my pure Dart lib into JavaScript has been useful for implementing a web version without having to use the normal Flutter stack.
I'm looking forward to the deeper multi-window support on desktop, as I've been largely avoiding adding support outside of mobile until now.
chrismorgan | 9 hours ago
My reason for disliking the Flutter ecosystem is that they massively oversell its web support, grossly misleading.
They have from the start portrayed Flutter Web as a sane choice for web apps; whereas it is in fact an appalling abomination painful to use. If your alternative was only making a mobile app, Flutter Web may be better than nothing, but (for targeting the web) you should never choose it for anything beyond games; yet they act as though it’s perfectly good and reasonable.
They used to have a DOM renderer, which was a little dodgy in implementation but overall a reasonable approach; but then they got rid of it some years ago rather than fixing it, doubling down on the pure-canvas approach where it is fundamentally impossible to get good results for pretty much anything beyond games.
They have improved things a little: https://flutter.dev/development/web#:~:text=Less%20ideal%20use%20cases does finally at least call Flutter Web “less ideal” for some use cases. But I’d say most of their “ideal use cases” are still very unsuitable, and their “less ideal” ones are all utterly inappropriate.
They’ve made a new demo now, https://wonderous.app/web/. So painful. Scrolling is atrocious (it’s not possible to implement scrolling acceptably without using real DOM elements, even if invisible), latency dreadful (the browser is a compositor: that’s also why you need to use a real scrolling area), performance abominable (maybe 20fps on my 5800HS laptop, roughly top-of-the-line for six years ago), things that should be links aren’t, and it doesn’t respect my chosen fonts because it implements the rendering entirely itself.
Given that they handle my area of expertise so very persistently very badly, while persistently claiming there is no problem, why would I think they’re doing better elsewhere? The impression I get is that it’s essentially Android-native and always foreign look-and-feel on all other platforms.
diktomat | 7 hours ago
That’s why. These cross-platform toolkits try to be native widgets without actually being native widgets, and one can always tell. Either because it just feels wrong or because one knows how it fails to be like native, i.e. why it feels wrong.
natfu | a day ago
Dart looks like an interesting language and Flutter is most likely nicer than a pile of different stacks, when you're a small team. At my previous job we did consider it for an application but didn't go with it because we didn't trust Google to maintain it long term. Maybe there's hope yet =)
[OP] heavyrain266 | 23 hours ago
Canonical currently is a maintainer of desktop-side of things at least.
confusedalex | a day ago
Great to see these changes! UI design in Flutter was something I always struggled with, especially when trying to make an app look good on iOS and Android