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Flutter

Creative technology is constantly evolving.
There is always a new way of solving an old problem
and in some cases significantly simplifying the solution.

nelsonic-overwhelmed-learning-tweet

Why? 🤷‍♀️

@dwyl we periodically ask ourselves the question:
If I was starting my journey from scratch now what tech would I learn/use?

If we could keep all the knowledge/wisdom and experience gained over 20+ years of programming but avoid any preconceptions and biases i.e. "sunk cost bias". Would we still choose the tech/tools we are currently using? Or would we pick something else completely different?

The people/teams/organisations that can objectively question why they use particular tech/tools can take advantage of all the advancements being made in the wider developer community.

What? 📱

The question we need to ask/answer before diving into any discussion of which technology/language/framework we should or shouldn't use is: What are problem are we trying to solve?

The last time we (informally) looked at Flutter in early 2018, it did not meet all our needs for a UI framework. At the time, it was focussed on Android, didn't support Web/PWAs and only had partial/beta support for IOs.

In the last couple of years Flutter has seen rapid development both from the army of Google Developers and the thriving community and it has matured considerably. It excels at all of our requirements.

Google is using Flutter for several of their cross-platform Native Mobile Apps including Google Adds (their main money maker) and Google Pay their popular global payments platform.
See: flutter.dev/showcase

google-apps-built-with-flutter

There are thousands more examples and more each day!

logos of companies using flutter

It's almost certain that you are already using an App on your Smart Phone that was built with Flutter whether you know it or not.

For a community list of Apps built with Flutter including many Open Source ones, see: itsallwidgets.com

Cross-platform Single Codebase Native App

Flutter is mobile first, has full/official support for Web/PWAs using the same code base as the Native Mobile and Desktop Apps.

image

Targetting all these platforms with a single codebase is a compelling proposition and it's only getting better!
See: medium.com/flutter/whats-new-in-flutter-3-8c74a5bc32d0

Google is investing heavily in Flutter, it's used for the Google Assistant, Google Ads and Stadia!

Guiding Principals

Returning to the @dwyl guiding principals for technology selection
outlined in the README.md We can see that Flutter meets all of them:

How?

As noted in the main README.md, we are using Elixir + Phoenix + PostgreSQL for the Web App. By using LiveView, Tailwind and Alpine.js (AKA the PETAL stack) to build features as a Web App first we iterate fast and maintain full control over SEO.

Once the feature is built for the Web fast-loading and SEO-friendly HTML, we will port the feature to Dart + Flutter for a cross-platform offline-first native exeperience.

Dart

Dart is a strongly typed object oriented general purpose programming language. It is the language used to build Flutter Apps. https://dart.dev/ image

If you know any JavaScript (ES6) and TypeScript then you will feel at home in Dart

More detail in: https://github.com/dwyl/learn-dart

Flutter

We are recording our learning of Flutter in: dwyl/learn-flutter

All the practical detail is there.


Background

We are building our App: dwyl/app. We selected Phoenix for the Backend because we find Elixir easy to read, reason about and write. (far more so than other major programming languages). More detail in: learn-elixir/issues/102 The data we are storing is relational in nature. We are creating items of text that have an unlimited length. We want to apply meta data to those items and create rich interactions around them. We will have many useful features in the App but the core will be items, timers, lists and people.

As a small team with finite resources (and no desire to "raise" money from outside investors), we want to maximise our efforts to build the App that most people want/need. We are focussing on building the Web App initially because the web is universally accessible. Many companies have focussed their initial efforts on iOS because it's the easiest platform to target, iOS users have more disposable income and are more likely to pay for apps.

"Making an App for iOS is Faster and Less Expensive". "Android users tend to be less willing to pay for apps than iOS users, so free apps with in-app ads are more common." https://medium.com/@the_manifest/android-vs-ios-which-platform-to-build-your-app-for-first-22ea8996abe1 There are fewer iOS devices to target and test on which dramatically shortens dev timelines. e.g in 2022 there are only 7 supported screen sizes for iPhone:

In 2015 there were already "more than 24,000 different Android devices from 1300 brands" https://www.zdnet.com/article/android-fragmentation-there-are-now-24000-devices-from-1300-brands image That was before the explosion of new devices from Chinese and manufacturers. In 2022 there is no official stat for the number of devices or screen sizes (because Google is painfully aware of the fragmentation problem but doesn't want to surface it!) suffice to say that it's several orders of magnitude more complex to build an Android App that looks consistently good across all devices. Android development is considerably more complex, which is why devs prefer iOS for their MVP.

StackOverflow Dev Survey

Flutter was first included in the 2020 dev survey and was the 3rd "most loved" framework: https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2020#technology-most-loved StackOverflow-survey-2020-flutter-most-loved

In the 2022 survey Flutter has overtaken React Native in popularity: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/#section-most-popular-technologies-other-frameworks-and-libraries

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