I went to a Flutter.io meetup introduction last week, it’s really promising, agree with you.
They explained and showed that the big plus is that it makes the all development easier (in comparison to actual native development) because you don’t have to wait minutes to build your app in order to test your last changes, in a couple of seconds it pushes the changes to the test app. Furthermore the “output” is still a native app (no webview)
But still, I see some reasons to not adopt it too:
No PWA
It’s no web language code (html, typescript etc.) it’s Dart. Probably easy to learn but still not as easy as using html you probably already know
While you could produce an iOS app with Flutter, the UX design (Menu, Layout, etc.) gonna be a Material design. They have a layer for iOS design but only for special things otherwise the default is Material design
So I guess like everything, it depends on your background and on your goal. It probably deserves a try
Having got to the point of being able to submit my app to the app stores I am not convinced about the PWA functionality. I have three main issues with it:
screen size - the app is designed for phones and tablets not pc screens.
web traffic - slow internet connection and it looks terrible.
browser used - No control over what browser is being used - some user still have IE which does not support HTML 5 Audio.
Instead of PWA I rather go down the electron route - which is not that difficult to do.
Same with Flutter you can’t follow the electron path, you have to tips&tricks to be able to reuse stuffs. With a web base technology app, “kind of easy” to reuse code
About PWA, yep future will tell. Right now, Twitter and Pinterest told they improved their engagement and decreased their bounce rate with such apps, let see if the market experience gonna be the same for everyone
If I understand correctly I think you could use custom native code, iOS and Android, in Flutter which you use a bit like plugins.
Yep I wasn’t convince by the styling neither, having to change color in the Dart code sounded to me a bit like writing a Java Applet in 1999. But pushing the same change to the demo/test app which ran in parallel was super fast I’ve to say
I really wish when developing Ionic with ionic serve Chrome would update the screen when changes are made and saved - more and more I am having to close and restart ionic serve to make sure the changes are applied.
in the demo they just changed a color in the code, don’t know if it’s already reliable with big changes. furthermore it seems that this was really the big plus for every other developpers at the meeting. they were all native iOS or Android developpers and it seems that right now they all have to wait 3min during each build before being able to test their changes…when I heard that I was really happy to use Ionic
but still you are right, right now, when you modify something in a component which is use in a component which is use in a page, you most probably have to stop and start again. if you change something in a page, ionic serve handle it without problem. I guess like all the other stuffs they will improve that with or after v4
I doubt it will improve with version 4 - the issue is that chrome is trying to be clever and only reload files which have changes - when you make a small change (i.e. just one character) to a page’s TS code it can have a major effect - but chrome thinks it has not changed.
Now i understand why flutter keeps pushing this feature - I could never understand why it was a major selling point.
