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Comment by lxgr | Hacker News Reader

No idea if it's any better on Android, but on iOS I can recognize a Flutter app within seconds, by the frame rate on a new iPhone dropping to something I haven't seen on any mobile device (iOS or Android!) since the Android 2.2 days on extremely underpowered Qualcomm chips.

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On Android, Flutter apps are typically even faster than native on cheap low-end devices from my experience. I'm comparing using a Galaxy J3 pro and the difference is visible in favor of Flutter. On high-end devices, I don't see any difference.

That's also one of the reason why the framework is so popular in developing countries.

Most likely they’re not using the new impeller rendering engine. My flutter app is very smooth on iOS and I didn’t have to put in any fancy hacks to make it that way.

Flutter apps have god awful performance when there is even a single platform view on the screen. In effect this means that if the app is monetized by ads, have any video, map embed or anything of the sort, it will have sub-30fps and very janky scroll even on iPhone 15 Pro and it really seems that there is no hacks to save you.

That hasn’t been true for over a year maybe two at this point.

It is absolutely true still, it is especially bad on iOS and the worst when you have a ProMotion device. They did hard lock the max fps to 80fps on scrollable elements on ProMotion devices, which really is telling enough but it doesn't solve the very noticeable jitter either.

I'm writing a game in Flutter. The game has ads, shaders, custom gesture detectors, ... . I can tell you, it is absolutely butter smooth on iOS.

I tried something similar a few years ago and I would have said you're absolutely right. But with the one I'm writing now, it is quite the different experience.

Yep, my typical experience with flutter apps is having way more frame drops, and occasional bugs which lock up the entire UI and require an app restart. Thankfully I think google is moving towards just using the platform UI for most apps, though I can't remember where I read that so take it with a grain of salt.

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