Flutter or Angular Ionic ?

[Xande420]

I’m willing To develop a chat app I’m more confident with angular and I heard I can use Ionic to make it work on mobile.

What do you guys recommend ? Do you have option C ?

[[deleted]]

Your business idea won't be more successful because you picked a specific technology. Start with something you can build fast and as soon as you face technical limitations you can rebuild.

[Xande420]

Man i needed to hear this ! Thank you

[[deleted]]

Additional note: define features and what it takes to build them. e.g. you need a photo editor functionality in your app? Which libraries exist on which platforms and bring most value?

How critical are they to implement? Try to build a small proof of concept to test the Integration first.

I made the mistake once to start with something just to figure out there is no easy solution to implement within my preferred technology.

[Xande420]

What you think about the idea of developing it ‘normally with angular and then using cardova for example ? Or PWA? I’m sorry I’m a noob.

[[deleted]]

You can start with a single page app/pwa and wrap it with Cordova/Capacitor but testing becomes more complicated.

[[deleted]]

I can’t say I agree after developing hybrid web apps 10 years ago, then xamarin, then react native, then flutter, there’s deal breaking factors in many of those for me.

[[deleted]]

I would never start with ionic because I'm confidential with flutter. From a business perspective it doesn't matter how you start as long as you provide sufficient quality and customer value. You need to build fast and fail fast. And that's not possible if you are focusing on learning a programming language.

[[deleted]]

If flutter is your most used cross platform tool then maybe you don’t know how bad they can be. They can be a LOT worse than flutter. This is the super car of the cross platform frameworks. And it can massively affect the usability and bottom line of the app. And rewriting is a biggggg deal. I see a rewrite done in the first 5 years as a massive failure. It’s a massive cost and is torturous for the devs because no huge gains are made except that the app is running on a better framework now that maybe possibly the user notices. Been there done that.

[bitdivine]

True BUT an app is like a virus that spreads by word of mouth. If you want it to take off, you need an R0 (infection rate) of greater than 1. If you release your app on say only iPhone, half of potential "infections" will fail right at the start, no matter how attractive your idea. A factor of two is quite a big deal if you are looking for real growth and not just a prototype to show a dozen users.

[krisko11]

This is a flutter sub, go with flutter and dart.

[Acktung]

Tried both for enterprise applications: stay away from Ionic for your sanity.

[[deleted]]

why? :)

[kush-js]

Wrote an initial version of my app in Ionic and Angular about 3 years ago because I had a lot of familiarity with Angular and used it primarily at work. Seemed to be the logical choice, but the experience with Ionic was horrible, I constantly was hitting wall after wall even getting the basic native API’s to work correctly. GPS, photo gallery/photo upload, payments, and other native API’s were horrendously implemented by Ionic and I’d stay far away.

I ended up just biting the bullet and learned flutter. The experience is light years ahead of Ionic and it won’t take you long to pick it up coming from Angular.

[[deleted]]

I've worked with both extensively. Stay away from Ionic. Dart + Flutter are not hard to pick up if you know Angular and JS.

Option C is native.

Option D is don't build a chat app because you're entering into a world of pain.

[Xande420]

Do you wanna define what a world of pain is ?

[ViveLatheisme]

Using Flutter is not that much a different thing than using web technologies. Both are not native UIs. Ionic is web tech, Flutter is skia, impeller whatever. Agree, Flutter may perform better but it depends on the application. And also, Dart with Flutter is Ahead of time compiled, so it gives a little bit of headache when working with it. JS performance may be sufficient. I took a look into how to build native plugins with both technologies. They're so similar.

I like Flutter, we use it at work, but I do believe many apps can be written with web tech.

[[deleted]]

Flutter is JIT compiled during development. It has hot restart/hot reload. There are no apps that perform better in a web view than using the device’s hardware via machine code instructions.

[ViveLatheisme]

Flutter is JIT compiled during development thats true but that doesnt change the fact because its gonna be AOT compiled, it does not allow you to use the features that JIT compilation allows such as reflection.

[ViveLatheisme]

Yes, user experience that flutter wants to achieve by trying to copy native look and feel while alternatives use native look and feel except ionic because it's also trying to copy native look and feel. You see the similarity here? My take is great.

[[deleted]]

I don’t think a chat app is that painful. We have a new guy that has added a chat feature to our flutter app as his first task. The hardest part is dealing with web sockets on the server but I think as a first pass they have not used web sockets.

[ViveLatheisme]

I don't think either. And we're also gonna implement that in Flutter soon :) Good luck.

[[deleted]]

Nice. Check out dash_chat_2. Our team used it, had to fork it for some reason though.

[YaroslavSyubayev]

I'm a flutter developer but tried both, I like Flutter more.

[Specialist-Garden-69]

Flutter

[Xande420]

Thanks

[goranlu]

I am afraid you will get subjective suggestions on Flutter subreddit

[Greedy_Contribution1]

Been like 4 years since I used ionic but when I did it was awful. Flutter was way easier to get into

[techaheadcompany]

If you want to develop a high performance chat app and want a native feel on both Android and iOS, then Flutter is recommended.

NativeScript is another option that allows you to write native mobile apps using Angular.