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Comment by dickjocke | Hacker News Reader

<Also fanboy > Learning Flutter is really easy. I know everyone says it, but I encourage everyone to spend one Saturday trying to build some toy app with a single Google Maps screen or something. I fought with React Native for so long because it's dominant but I don't think I can ever go back. I never found myself getting truly comfortable with it or feeling like it did what I expected.

Im a backend dev so I really love that flutter will handle so much of the positioning of widgets/components on the screen AND give me a decent styling out the box and I only have to intervene if I want to. Thinking back to Grids and Flexbox makes my skin crawl lol.

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Xamarin and Qt also give me the same, with more useful industry programming languages.

Both of which are now practically deaf on mobile. Flutter comes from Google, and while that doesn't guarantee it'll live, at least it has better potential.

They are only dead on the SV HN bubble kind of thing.

Dart also comes from Google and if it wasn't for Ad Words team it would be more dead than anything else.

Flutter is it very last opportunity to stay relevant.

Given that, I rather bet in dead technology with useful programming languages.

Hard disagree. Microsoft has practically abandoned Xamarin and is doing React Native themselves these days. Qt tried on mobile but never took off, there's hardly any mobile apps made with it and the few there are feel very out of place. Note that I really like Qt/QML so I wish it fared better -- please let me know if you have some success stories to share.

Flutter is the last option for Dart to stay relevant sure. You learn a programming language in a couple of days though so it just doesn't matter, and doesn't change the fact that in mobile world C# and C++ are just as irrelevant. I worked for years with C++, but I don't expect to ever again need it in a professional setting.

This is of course just from mobile perspective. Everywhere else Flutter is currently useless, and Qt/C# perhaps a good choice.

Microsoft has officially communicated many times, including at BUILD 2019 and .NET Conf, that React Native is for Web developers, and Xamarin for .NET developers.

They aren't one pony trick shop.

Qt didn't not take off for free beer mobile devs, it is doing alright for the kind of corporations that actually buy development tools.

Again we aren't talking about SV HN kind of bubbles here.

And I am betting Flutter won't save Dart, specially with Android team doing JetPack Composer and teaming with JetBrains on Kotlin/Native portability between iOS and Android.

Long term, PWAs with WebGL and WebAssembly will take it all.

The article topic was mobile development frameworks, so that was the basis for my judgement of Xamarin and Qt too. I do mobile development professionally, and Xamarin and Qt aren't current topics. It's basically only native vs. React Native, with Flutter recently challenging the React Native side on dev mindset but not yet on job opportunities.

Qt is used in corporations that buy development tools yes. But not for mobile, it's mostly embedded/medical/automotive. Xamarin peaked after Windows Phone died as the refuge of C# development, but React Native ate its crossplatform pie. Are they used? Sure, as a very small niche. But the fact is that currently companies with money build two native apps, and those with less money to throw around use React Native to target both platforms.

It's hard to get excited about web technologies replacing native apps when they've been upcoming contenders since around 2007 starting with Symbian. Maybe it happens one day, maybe it doesn't.

On my market if JavaScript is at all considered, only Ionic comes into play.

Don't project your anecdotes in world wide projections.

Any numbers from Gartner reports or something, to prove how my little bubble is a niche?

For mobile non-game apps in app stores, targeting private people as users? If so, you then do have a very different market around there indeed. Let's not dig for market research reports, I don't really have the interest for that now. I'll just take your word for it.

That's neat, im just not much of a .NET person myself and I guess that using a language/framework that is enjoyable is more valuable to me than the portability aspect. I came into React Native for those portability reasons, and it wasn't enough to keep me excited about it. I don't see how Xamarin and .NET, which im even less into, would be different.

Also I'm not sure that Xamarain or QT are really very relevant, HNSVBubble or otherwise.

https://insights.stackoverflow.com/trends?tags=xamarin%2Crea...

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