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You should try Dart/Flutter again, they've improved a lot.

- Dart. It's richer than JS/TS with stronger type safety, and seems purpose-built for UI. Fewer Dart developers than JS, but I'd argue those JS developers cannot be immediately effective coding React Native (Expo) anyway.

- Emulated components vs. real native components. For multi-platform apps, this is actually desirable. These kinds of apps have their own design system.

- Speed. In my experience, it's negligible, but maybe because I keep using the latest version.

- Ecosystem. Flutter/Dart occasionally introduces "breaking" changes (such as migration to null safety, and recently deprecation of CocoaPods). Community very quick to update their plugins and adapt. Some abandoned plugins were immediately forked to keep being maintained.

- Migrating to native platforms, easier for agents to read an RN project. I'd argue it should be _easier_ to do that with Dart since the language is less "ambiguous" than JS.

However it's not perfect. My complaints:

- Not ideal for web apps with lots of FIRST-time visitors, due to initial download. There are some attempts to solve this, e.g. deferred loading, but I think inherently it's unsolvable since you need to download the whole world (a few MBs) to have the app running on your browser. That's why for this scenario I use SvelteKit. But if you already have a mobile app and want to get a web app "for free", this is a useful feature.

- WebView support is inconsistent across platforms (I'm looking at you, Windows and Linux).

- Text fields are quirky on Android TV.

3 comments

They still haven't got native scrolling perfect for iOS. I used a big name app just today and I could instantly tell without looking it up that it was a flutter app, because the scrolling felt non-native.

This is fixed in the past few versions of Flutter, they likely haven't updated their SDK.

If that's the case I might reappraise flutter!

You definitely should, it's grown a lot and Dart 3.0+ in general is a much nicer language than before, due to adopting functional features as well as having a garbage collector.

Scrolling is like an Achilles' heel of Flutter. There's still no smooth scrolling with mouse for web.

> it's unsolvable since you need to download the whole world (a few MBs) to have the app running on your browser

another reason why the web should move from whole app bundling to content addressed CDNs for library code. you would only need to download one copy for each framework version not every site. and its easy to make it decentralized with IPFS if you want.

Shared caches stopped working years back, to close a security hole. They're redownloaded per domain now. https://dev.to/rstacruz/public-cdns-arent-useful-anymore-2b6...

There’s a proposal to bring back cross-site file caching with a fix for the privacy issue:

https://github.com/WICG/cross-origin-storage

Is it now possible to use native font stack of OS? Last time I checked, it wasn’t possible and apps had to bundle custom fonts as workaround.

To be honest I never tried and never have the need, as usually I either don't care about the font (use default) or I really care for branding purpose so I always bundle it to be sure.