Hacker News Reader

Comment by quangio | Hacker News Reader

I don't think using non-OEM widgets is a bad thing because it's not like Electron; Flutter uses Skia to render widgets, and it's fast. There is an article https://medium.com/flutter-io/why-flutter-doesnt-use-oem-wid...

View on HN

I'm always concerned that accessibility is being left behind. Android and iOS both put great efforts into making their UI accessible, why do the work again? Chances are that the accessibility of those third-party components will be worse or maybe doesn't even work at all.

The problem is that the accessibility work already needs to be done on every platform (for now we have two really popular ones but nobody can be sure what the future brings).

Also, if you could just recompile your app for a new platform and release (more or less), it would remove the biggest barrier to entry for possible new platforms: Adoption.

That's not what I meant. Android and iOS already have their own widgets with accessibility features in place. iOS even better than Android. It took years for them to develop to where they are now.

Now Flutter is making its own widgets that look and handle like the corresponding native widgets. So they need to implement accessibility all over again in the same way that is already present on the platforms. Google is thus redoing all the work they already did in Android.

A lesson from modern software development is that software is developed incrementally and because accessibility is never high on those priority lists, it will lack in quality at first and take multiple iterations to get up to the same level as the native accessibility of the OS, if it even gets there in the first place.

I think accessibility was a requirement for an internal google flutter app, have you had a chance to look at https://flutter.io/accessibility/

I love Flutter, and how it looks, but while I was at the Google I/O Extended I was given an Android Things Kit. That specific version of the kit did not had GPU, and later (at home) when I tried Flutter - it was running very slow, while other android apps were manageable.

Then again, this is more of an outlier (today) with the GPU present almost on any mobile device, but still something to know about (e.g. flutter won't be of good use there).

that's an interesting point. wonder how bad it is for battery since it takes away the cpu/gpu decision from the OS

A GPU is possibly more energy efficient given a much more complex scene, animation, effects, etc. than what you would draw with CPU, and much faster. But in case there is no GPU, one must definitely go without any complexities, heavy draw calls, etc. Kind of obvious, but may get forgotten. I certainly don't know what's best in this case, unless I have some time on my own to experiment and see. One reason custom, but fixed hardware tends to get better software over the time, is that developers learn how to use it best (for example: game consoles/systems/arcades, classic computers... whether they have GPU, or not (in the distant past)).

From the article:

> In other words, in today’s market, a branded, custom UI is king.

Does a custom UI per app not make it more difficult for people to learn each new app? Didn't the platform developers write their human interface guidelines for a reason? Or was that level of consistency only necessary in the early days of Mac and Windows, when the temptation was to port a DOS app straight over rather than redesigning it as a GUI?

Platforms also like their branded, custom UIs. When you build an app that uses the platforms widgets, you reinforce the platform's brand. When you use the same look everywhere, on the web and for apps on each platform, you reinforce your own brand.

If platform developers cared so much about consistency, they wouldn't change their UI design just to freshen up their image or because design trends have changed. Maybe looking and behaving like everyone else really has a major influence on user adoption, but it usually seems to be ignored in favor of branding.

For mobile platforms, is there such a thing as timeless, classic UI design that won't look dated next year, but doesn't require every app developer to create their own brand?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com