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Comment by traderjane | Hacker News Reader

I wonder how people who were on the fence for Flutter will think about this.

I've had great experiences with Ionic in the past. Capacitor removing the headache that is Cordova looks promising and I'm glad Ionic is moving in that direction. It's a great platform and there's lots of support out there for it. I've chosen Flutter for my latest project however for two main reasons: 1) JS ecosystem fatigue. 2) Not having to write JS or CSS is frankly a breath of fresh air. I can build a UI logically with out the refresh-and-pray experience, even if things get kinda verbose. I should also add that this app is not "brochureware" and needs a more app and less web-like UI. I think Ionic currently excels in the latter.

After experiencing a year of 'let's build an Angular app with 60+ developers', Flutter is a breath of Fresh air. I'm an army of one again!

I'm just a bit concerned how Flutter is basically going its own way rather than building on web standards. E.g. HTML provides declarative layout while JavScript is ubiquitous and could also be transpiled to native code. Rather, Flutter is building its own declarative UI approach, rendered with its own canvas, building on a significantly less ubiquitous language/ecosystem, and is principally governed by a single organization.

That said, I am seriously considering using Flutter for a future development project, but am on the fence due to the value and familiarity I see in the web platform.

I wouldn't use Flutter for web development. It solves targeting iOS and Android without having to use a Javascript Bridge. Neither mobile platform defines its interfaces in terms of HTML. There are definitely a few development teams where React Native is also a valid choice, but cross-platform mobile app development has a learning curve regardless.

I build the occasional small mobile application. I evaluated Ionic, React Native, and Flutter about 18 months ago; and ultimately landed on Ionic for the projects I needed to ship.

Next one will likely use Flutter.

The "Hello world" story on Ionic is pretty good--you generate a project and it works. But configuring and maintaining the various layers (Ionic, Cordova, Android Studio and XCode projects for actual building the apps) has been pretty brutal for apps I only touch every few months. So many dependencies that prove very difficult to update correctly.

The story looks to be improving with Capacitor though, so I suppose I'll give it another look when that stabilizes.

Hey Brad, definitely take a look at Capacitor. We built it explicitly to solve those issues in Cordova. Also keep in mind Flutter also has to deal with native projects and deps so there are some “hard problems” not unique to Cordova here

Oh I have no doubt the grass isn't purely greener on the Flutter side. There's a ton of moving parts here for any solution to deal with.

Capacitor does look really nice--it was in early beta (maybe even alpha) last time I started a new app project, haven't looked since. Will definitely give it a fair shake when the opportunity arises.

EDIT:

Adding a bit context to my earlier comment: one of the bigger points of frustration in managing dependencies was figuring out which versions of ionic, ionic-native, ionic/angular, angular, and angular's 6 dozen peer deps actually work together.

Definitely doesn't help that I don't use Angular or Ionic on a regular basis, but documenting the expected versions of other components would be a huge help for me.

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