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What do you guys think of Flutter and AngularDart, for developing for Android/IOS and web, sharing a common code base?

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  • 2
    Is it possible? -> Yes

    Would I? -> No

    I hate hybrid mobile development with a passion. Its becoming like JS frameworks. There is a new "best ever" every few months. None of them have the time to become mature enough before the next comes out. They all suffer from the same problems and they all have a tiny portion of the community size. If you are going to be doing anything even moderately complex, you will come across issues that should be simple to resolve, but will instead be very complex having to deal with the native OS and the layers in-between it.

    Depending on how much code you are looking to share between the web, i'd also question whether you even need a mobile app. Responsive webpages are often a better solution to the web app + hybrid route.
  • 1
    @practiseSafeHex You've got a point in that a responsive web app might render the mobile app unnecessary. The only issue I've found with this are background notifications in IOS.

    Also I don't know about other frameworks, but I'm liking Flutter a lot when compared to native Android development. The community behind it isn't as huge as native, but its got potential in my opinion.

    And I have to say, I was on the same boat as you before getting into Flutter.
  • 2
    @Eddydpyl If you have a native only feature that you need, then yes a mobile app makes sense.

    I hear what you are saying about flutter, but I can't share those opinions because early last year people said the same about react-native, and before that everyone was freaking out that you could use Angular and Iconic. Everyone said Xamarin would take over the world when they started trying to match iOS storyboards and Auto Layout, then we had titanium, kony and phonegap all fighting it out at the same time before that.

    Theres only so many times history can repeat itself before you sit up and say "ah, here we go again".

    If you like flutter and think it will work for you, go ahead and give it a go. Especially so if its a small app. But based on the tech stack, I'm not holding my breath for it to be something I would consider using over native any time soon.
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    @practiseSafeHex makes sense, thanks for your input!
  • 0
    I’ve basically made a living doing it. It is what it is. I’ve never had the down time to learn the native languages fully. Currently migrating from Cordova to react native. There’s not a “good one” unfortunately. Just some that have better support for the specific features you use. So if you can do your research right and build for both platforms from the start it doesn’t matter you are gonna have to do some fucky shit to get any of it to work properly and there is no telling how many times your environment variables will break or how fucked an update can really make you. And or you’ll roll back versions and manually change target apis because some plug in isn’t maintained.

    It’s a nightmare. Is it better than writing 2 apps with 2 code bases for an app that just does a dozen api calls, absolutely. Could this be pulled off with a responsive web app yes. Can we get away with not having an app, no all our competitors have an app. When ya gotta do something, it’s something.
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