Cross-platform app toolkit Flutter lead Tim Sneath aims Dart at an ambient computing future

Google's cross-platform app development framework Flutter marked another quarterly release on Thursday with the debut of Flutter 1.22. The Register had the opportunity to speak with Tim Sneath, product lead at Flutter, about the project's state and ambitions. "This is a decent sized release, with support for iOS 14, Android 11 …

[Robert Grant]

If you want to learn Flutter

This is an amazing video resource: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ukSR1GRtMU

No affiliation, other than I followed the tutorials and they were completely excellent. Probably the best online video training I've ever done.

[Anonymous Coward]

" it has this unique technical envelope"

I got as far as this, giggled and then went straight to the comments.

[Abominator]

More hateful frameworks. It will be old news in 2 years when its replaced by yet another framework.

All we will see is that you will need 3GB of memory to run a chat app in the coming years up from 0.5GB now.

[G Mac]

Luxury!

What I wouldn't give for 0.5GB of memory!

[Anonymous Coward]

"3GB of memory to run a chat app"

Let me present: Microsoft Teams.

[macjules]

100,000 Flutter apps in Google Play

How many of those made it through iOS checks to the AppleStore?

[J27]

Re: 100,000 Flutter apps in Google Play

It compiles to native code and Apple even lets though contained HTML apps like ones based on PhoneGap/Apache Cordova. Flutter isn't a problem in getting on the App Store.

[Anonymous Coward]

Cross platform?

Lowest common denominator crap that is out of place everywhere.

[Teiwaz]

Re: Cross platform?

Yep.

Cross-platform apps are always trailing as an uncomfortable last resort.

[J27]

Re: Cross platform?

I think you'd be surprised to know how many of the apps you use regularly are cross-platform. The good ones are indistiguishable from signel-platform apps.

[guyr]

Re: Cross platform?

Java is cross-platform, and is by far the largest language used for enterprise applications because it can get you were you need to be in a reasonable amount of time and resources. But Java GUI apps never really caught on because, as you say, they tend to look terrible and non-native, so people don't like them.

If Flutter can get an app on desired platforms in a short amount of time to get a feel for potential user interest, that seems like a desirable approach. Most organizations either can't afford or don't have the time to simultaneously develop for multiple native platforms. Then if sufficient interest exists, developers can weigh the cost and benefits of a native approach for specific platforms.

[Elledan]

Dart off

Image if WxWidgets or Qt had you learn an entirely new language just to be able to use their fancy framework?

Qt offers QML in addition to the native libraries for the folk who feel that everything should be in JavaScript, but there's no QtScript or similar.

I am guessing that this is another case of Google's Not-Invented-Here syndrome?

[John Smith 19]

Proprietary dev framework built on proprietary 4GL

As they used to call them back in the day.

A number of companies built successful businesses on their in house dev language and tools (like MDIS building the software most British libraries ran on).

And conceptually I also like the idea of a large organization in house IT being able to say to any of it's OS vendors "F**k you. We're off this platform. You're history"

But betting on Google to notdump this in X years, where X is a quite small integer?

As for "performance" the wrong answer produced 100x faster than an accurate answer is still a s**t answer.

[Sin2x]

For web at least, Dart is terrible being much slower than the ubiquitious JS: https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/fastest/node-dart.html

For mobile, well, let's say PWAs suck -- in general. If you want to have a product with decent performance you need to go native, and that's not React Native. Kotlin for Android and Swift for iOS.

[J27]

Dart was a bad design decision, if they had gone with Kotlin it would have been easier to convert existing Android devs. Google seems to be actively working against itself these days.