danbalthasar

Full disclosure: I'm a Flutter team member who has focused specifically on iOS development.

There are a number of us dedicated to this on the team internally at Google. It's definitely a priority. Each platform has its own challenges though, and there's a very wide variety of issues that can arise that are platform specific. The more feedback we can get about what people want to do that isn't working, the more we can address it :)

There's a demo of running native tests that also test flutter on iOS here: https://github.com/flutter/ios_add2app

Flutter's edge over these technologies is faster development cycles (very fast build times, sub-second reloading without losing state, very rapid ability to update code/GUI after deployment to a testing device, and very fast render times).

Xamarin and Qt are fine products, and I know Xamarin has been working on some improvements over deploy times, but it still can't touch what Flutter does there. And if you know C++ and C# already, Dart is a breeze.

I hear you. I was suspicious of this too, but there's been a lot of work put into making the controls we design work well and properly implement accessibility/native platform behaviors. And when something is off, someone ends up raising an issue and it gets fixed.

It also makes it very easy for developers to create their own custom widgets/layouts that are pretty challenging to achieve in other platforms.

I hope you'll give it a try some time - if nothing else, you might be able to raise some issues to help us improve some of those details!

Flutter takes full control of the rendering pipeline directly on both platforms - all the controls your seeing are written in Dart for Flutter, but designed to mimic the best of what the platform offers.

In particular, this means that if you're running an Android app on an older device, it can still show the latest Material design widgets (and similarly for iOS, showing the latest Cupertino styled widgets, or Material).

Dart 2.0 is not Dart 1.0. And the Flutter team has had a large hand in shaping and forming Dart to its current state (and continues to drive certain priorities for it).

Dart is easy to learn (espeically if you come from a JavaScript, Java, or C# background). It can be compiled in ways suitable for distribution in both Apple and Play Stores. And the Flutter team has direct access to the language team behind Dart to ensure that it works well for mobile development.

First party maps support has recently landed, as well as WebView.

Geolocation plugins have been available for quite sometime now, as have encryption and file storage.

There is a large and growing team supporting Flutter at Google. Flutter is here to stay, and even beyond Google's investment in it there's a large number of dedicated community contributors too!

Dart isn't perfect, and I think at the least would really benefit from Union types. There are some open issues related to these things though:

https://github.com/dart-lang/sdk/issues/4938 (Unions) https://github.com/dart-lang/sdk/issues/421 (Tuples)

Please feel free to contribute here! That said, it's certainly possible to work around these things. Dart has a tuple library (https://github.com/dart-lang/tuple) which covers a lot, and much of what you'd use Unions for can still be covered by accepting `Object` or `dynamic` parameter types and doing some typechecking.