Wisdom from the Flutter Front Lines

Stone writes..

Hello! Long time listener first time caller,


I’m listening to the latest code radio episode and wanted to drop my two cents on the declarative UI portion of the show. For background, I’m a Flutter developer and have been working in it since sometime during the v1 release. I also work in ReactJS and have tried my hand at Xamarin, React Native, and even UWP.



To the point of “write once and looks great everywhere”, I will say Flutter is the closest to this dream of all the alternatives discussed. Unlike other cross platform frameworks, Flutter uses its own rendering engine. Allowing for custom UI elements that really do look the same no matter what platform it’s running on. This as opposed to the way other cross-platform libraries work which is essentially just a library that translates to native UI and makes it harder to have consistent look and feel across platforms like iOS, Android, or Desktop.

I’m not saying it’s perfect by any stretch of the imagination though. Web development, while technically officially supported, still runs rather horribly on mobile browsers. And there’s still an amount of work needed to make UI adaptive based on device size. However, the overall polish, performance, and ease of development out-weighs the cons in my opinion. I’ve brought multiple production applications to market using Flutter and think we will only see more examples as the platform matures.

One last thing I’ll forewarn to anyone considering Flutter, is at some point you will have to gain some basic knowledge in Swift and Kotlin. This is if you want to hook into platform native functions (think local authentication) where plugins are not available or just prefer to “write it yourself”.

Anyway, love the shows and look forward to the upcoming meetups!