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Everyone from original Dart team left, Lars is now one of co-founders of a startup trying to sell a Dart like language for IoT.

Dart and Flutter futures are are now married, and I still don't buy into Flutter.

Languages married with UI frameworks seldom last, specially when the competition outside of the UI framework is so much better in tooling and available set of libraries.

Plus hot reloading were a novelty when Smalltalk, Common Lisp, Oberon System, Eiffel got introduced into the market.

And the competition isn't sleeping either, Flutter touched the Android team nerves hard enough that now we are getting Jetpack Composer, Xamarin already has its prototype available, Qt always kind of had it, so in the next twos (give or take it), all the cross-platform mobile frameworks will have dynamic code reload, with more market relevant languages, couple with 20 - 30 years of libraries.

Until Google releases Fuchsia and makes everyone write Dart code, I will pass. Qt, Xamarin, PWAs do the job just fine, with more mature languages.

Your post reads as FUD. Of course it isn't because I assume you are not one flutter's competitors. Nevertheless, worrying about what something might do in the future is classic FUD. We don't know if those others will develop hot reload, we don't know when and we don't know how good it will be. So FUD is a poor basis for a technical decision.

There's some merit in the mature language argument but dart has been around for some time now and doesn't have any radical features - although on the other hand you seem to be saying it's not novel enough like Oberon etc.

Do all those others have 20-30 years of libraries? I think that's just Qt. I spent a couple of years using Qt and it's very good but it is C++ which isn't for everyone. (The python version probably fails your maturity criteria)

Yes they do, Java was released in 1996, .NET in 2002, JavaScript if we consider only npm release then 2010.

What FUD? Had not been for AdWords team there wouldn't be any Dart to talk about.

Right now, Dart is meaningless without Flutter.

While all the other languages are a safer bet, in terms of what to have on the CV, even if the frameworks written in them fail in the market.

It’s good to have multiple choices, but given the momentum and quality of apps developed using Flutter, I think it’s ahead and will have enough developers to keep it relevant and stay.

Also UI programming is very complex given the proliferation of device form factors, interaction and implicit inputs using sensors. It needs language especially designed to handle all of it and provide a smooth user experience. For end user UI is the whole system. Dart is especially designed for it.

It provides superior developer experience compared to other cross platform UI toolkit. I think a language designed for user interface programming providing clean, smooth and performant developer experience is a need which dart fill.

Obviously not everyone likes declarative UI programming and they will lean towards what they know. I am from the camp who prefer declarative UI’s and that’s the reason like SwiftUI and Flutter.

We are getting that with JetPack Composer, which might be eventually supported on Kotlin/Native, as per Android team set of questions on their latest surveys.

What are some examples of quality apps made with Flutter on iOS?

> Everyone from original Dart team left

Is that true? Pretty sure Munificent is still on the team and he's been the only Dart team member I know of...

As far as I know he isn't part of original team, Gilad and Lars were.

Dart replacing JS would be an interesting timeline but not one we’re in for at least short term.

I also had concerns about Dart/Flutter at first but they almost entirely went away a week after starting.

It’s just really friendly. As far as Flutter is concerned it’s awesome you can see the Dart objects that build the Flutter widgets, the language itself is good and getting better, I’m just really happy we went this direction.

> Lara Bak

Lars Bak

> no one wants dartvm in browsers except chrome

The Chrome team also rejected the Dart VM

>It might fit Facebook’s case (although they abandoned it themselves in favour of native speaks volumes about it).

This doesn't appear to be true. Do you have a source?

I’m not sure about abandoned but I think the uptake at facebook was never really that big, on iOS only the marketplace is written in RN with the rest remaining in ObjC / UIKit. This doesn’t really mean much though since theres no reason for them to rewrite everything in RN. I would be interested to know what the uptake is for new projects there.

>But I think keeping in sync changes in API, hardware device drivers and new interactions across different platforms and device will still be nightmare and in general it will play catch up with native. It can be seen in the number of issues opened on flutter project on GitHub [1]. Hopefully there is some support from different platforms so it remains reasonable choice and perform well compared to native.

I am an optimist; I have high hopes for the future of mobile development. Specifically, I hope that the developers who develop AndroidOS and iOS will metaphorically bend over backwards to make Flutter compatible with those operating systems. After all, isn't it in Apple and Google's best interest to make mobile development as painless as possible?

It's in Apple's interest to make development for solely iOS as painless as possible. See Metal vs Vulkan.

Android exists so that Apple doesn't have 100% of the market share, not because Google cares about the UX of the users or the developers.

I think neither have any real incentive to make Flutter work better than it already does.

A lot of apps are still developed iOS-first, which is a problem for Android. Encouraging cross-platform development over iOS-first is a win for the Android platform, not so much for Apple.

>A lot of apps are still developed iOS-first

Why? Last time I checked, Android had 85% of the market share.

Value of users = number of users * amount users spend

A chunk of Android's market share is people for whom $5 isn't a coffee but a days wages.

While probably true globally, that isn't so in every local.

My team develops and maintains a mobile banking application for a national market of a small European nation, and our user base is 70% Android. Due to wages here, 5$ is chump change.

Obviously though, we aren't monetizing our product in the usual way.

> Obviously though, we aren't monetizing our product in the usual way.

I think that could be a large difference in approaches.

You are a bank and want all of your customers happy. If bank made an iOS only it would piss off a lot of its customers.

On the other hand if you are monetizing, you have to look at revenue streams from both platforms and decide which is the bigger revenue stream (not most users) and make sure that one work's first. Obviously you want both to work well but if the split is 70/30 to iOS you will prioritize iOS first.

Not to be pedantic, but I think you mean the opposite of chump change?

Also, I absolutely didn't mean to say it's impossible to monitize Android. I only meant to say it isn't clear Android is a significantly more rewarding to target customer base than iPhone, as my parent said.

I may be mistaken, as English is not my first language, but my meaning was that 5$ is considered a small or insignificant amount of money here.

Amongst other things, and in my experience, ease and speed of development.

Not everywhere: UK is 50/50, same with USA and AU. Globally yes, but On the ground in different markets it’s different. We’re uk based e-com and android devices are a minuscule part of our traffic, so we’re doing iOS first.

> It has enough developer momentum behind it and it’s unlike react native a bolt on solution to somehow make it work.

I see React as a web-first framework, and RN as a fast path for porting to mobile. I've heard that flutter has early stage web support, but that it's all based on canvas, which is enough to dissuade me for using it for a web-first app. I'd be curious to know your perspective on this.

Not the OP but React-native support for the web is also very early stage, I don't think I would use either for building a web platform.

This isn’t quite accurate, it’s mature enough for Twitter to use it for their new site for example (and to hire the creator of react-native-web): https://twitter.com/necolas/status/913877194199359488?s=21

I'm quite surprised by that, I've tried myself react-native-web and found it a bit limited. Maybe it has improved since then.

It's not something I've attempted yet, but I'm under the impression that a React -> React Native port is easier than building a Flutter app for Mobile, and then doing something else for web. Might be wrong?

With React Native you would also have to rewrite your components, it's unlikely your average React component would work without web dom & css.

That's stating the obvious. Of course the UI would need re-implementation. Just like in Flutter, you might have a different UI for Cupertino and Android flavours, except with React, you'd have generic UI for mobile in RN (for better or worse), and your dom/css for React. You would be able to re-use much of the javascript logic and have .tsx as the consistent language throughout the code base. Ideally...

React Native is still used widely at Facebook. It's never been abandoned. They abandoned HTML5, which is entirely different.