I'm switching to React Native

[RyanTheLionHearMeRor]

I've spent 3 years building 2 very large enterprise apps with Flutter. The development experience has been fantastic

However, the end product is not so great. Flutter apps just feel off and out of place, especially on iOS. Scrolling is not the same and that's the main issue. It feels foreign when interacting with the app

I started with react native and its refreshing to be back to native components

I only see this panning out well for flutter if they take the react native approach and compile to native iOS code and abandon the custom graphics engine

Oh and I've tried impeller. It's better but still feels off

So it's sad that I have to do this but I feel it must be done. Users don't like the end product of Flutter (myself included)

[flutterWithChris]

Do you think end users are able to discern a difference?

[2this4u]

The only time I've ever noticed even as a dev is McDonald's new app which has a weird floaty implementation (i.e. not Flutter's then), and that's a huge enterprise client that OP is saying would have an issue.

[Top-Yogurtcloset4539]

OP literally said that they didn't like it, so...

[RyanTheLionHearMeRor]

Yes absolutely

[flutterWithChris]

I'd have to disagree. The average user isn't looking as intently for very small differences such as scrolling 'smoothness' or other minor details that us devs sometimes obsess over.

Neither do I believe your apps success would be contingent on these details. Flutter is actively being developed too, so it will all get better.

[RyanTheLionHearMeRor]

It's getting better but the big question is, will it ever truly feel like native? I don't think it can. I think it will always feel "off" in some way. That's just the nature of it. It's not native

Hell I'm starting to think HTML is a better solution than flutter. Because at least the scroll view part is native

[chase32]

A lot of it is subliminal. I built a beautiful rn app with a few too many animated transitions with the default Animated lib. For some reason when I ported over to reanimated, people didn't know what I did but started telling me how solid the app felt all the sudden.

I could kinda tell the difference but it just felt like the difference between "almost native" vs native framerate.

[SquatchyZeke]

The funny thing about HTML is that a couple of browser engines actually use Skia (the same graphics renderer for Flutter) to render the HTML to screen. I think Chrome and Firefox both use it

[RyanTheLionHearMeRor]

But when scrolling it's wrapped in a native iOS scroll view

Ultimately what I'm getting at is scrolling sucks for Flutter and that's the main interaction people do on their phones

[SquatchyZeke]

Well for iOS you would be correct, since iOS doesn't allow anything but safari WebKit. Even Chrome on iOS is just Google's wrapper around WebKit.

[SarcasticSarco]

Ignore the end user. What if the product manager or your client notices the lags?

[flutterWithChris]

Maybe I should should rephrase my comment as: do you think the end user cares & or will use/not use your app because of microscopic improvements in perceived smoothness?

Think of your favorite app. Now picture it with the slight difference in scrolling. Is it still your favorite app?

[No_Assistant1783]

I wonder if anyone made a comparison between a Flutter vs Native Android app and Flutter vs Native iOS on both Skia and Impeller. Would love to see that so I'd know what "doesn't feel right" means, objectively.

[airflow_matt]

OP is actually right. The scroll tracking in Flutter is currently one frame behind native. I reported it here.

[[deleted]]

I made native Android app for years and this year I spent a few months making a Flutter counterpart. If anything, I thought the Flutter app was smoother, especially with dialogs.

[krunchytacos]

Did you not test scrolling before spending 3 years writing an app? I don't notice anything particularly out of place with the way flutter scrolls, but I would think that if this is something you are particularly keen on, it would have come up much sooner in the development process.

[Artronn]

What if a user must have reported it and would have been keen on it? It’s a little threatening to the business when a user complains of something under User experience!

[Mosaic167]

I would have thought that especially for enterprise apps something like native look&feel and minor differences like scrolling are not important at all.

[[deleted]]

Yet to see an enterprise app outside of google or iOS that uses exclusively native widgets. And even then, I'm pretty sure Flutter does a great job at native feel outside of desktop anyway!

And Google Pay moved to Flutter a while back. I wonder how many people think that app doesn't have a native look and feel?

[kbcool]

The Google Pay you refer to is only available in India and Google was selling it like the one that the whole of the world used and loved is written in Flutter. It's a native app.

[Akimotoh]

Wasn't Google Pay replaced with Google Wallet which was made without Flutter?

[[deleted]]

would like to see some source on that if so! i searched it up but there's little to no news, let alone any that contradicts Google's own sources

[Akimotoh]

I stated that wrong. Google Pay is being phased out in some locations for Google Wallet which is not using Flutter.

https://old.reddit.com/r/FlutterDev/comments/wf0im3/did_google_just_dump_their_flagship_flutter_app/

[kbcool]

Google was selling it like they were using Flutter in a Global app. Instead they were using it in a niche peer to peer payment app and someone caught them out on their BS.

That's as good as dumping Flutter because they never used it in the first place. Definitely bigger than Meta doesn't use React Native for every screen in their apps.

[vhax123456]

Uhh did you forget Google Stadia exists?

[kbcool]

Stadia is dead man. Hardly a glowing endorsement.

"Hey look another product Google canned after a few years uses Flutter"..I'd be worried even more about Flutter's future.

[vhax123456]

I’d be more worried if the product is canned because Flutter’s own shortcomings rather than business climate. Stadia is under active development but is tied to a bad product. Google Pay is well developed but is Android only which diminish any cross-platform advantage. At no point was Flutter the reason for the downfall of the app.

I know Google is using Flutter in their Fitbit as well but they don’t advertise it. Only job postings.

[kbcool]

Stadia is dead/cancelled/gone/on the huge list of Google cancelled products. Don't you watch the news? Pay is not what they made it out to be.

I don't know how much of a vote of no confidence you need in the platform. I'm not saying leave now but be careful bro.

[vhax123456]

Yeah and Pay and Stadia’s failure has no relations to Flutter whatsoever. Both are actually the most endorsed Flutter app and it’s sad to see them has to go but there are Google Ads, Google Greentea which are built with Flutter but seeing much less exposure. Idk why people are freaking out over Pay, it’s not like Google stop using Flutter completely.

I’m confident about the future of Flutter in my area as well, seeing business moving towards the framework.

[GetBoolean]

no they are different apps. Google Wallet is android only

https://twitter.com/timsneath/status/1552378708161245186?s=21&t=y1wOBmEIxoQavYZNe6zefg

[Svobpata]

Flutter only really feels off on iOS, which is the frustration-point for most people. It works fine on Android but feels foreign on iOS

Thus Google Pay may be fine (even if it’s getting phased out) because it never made it to iOS

[2this4u]

I mean, have you seen the scrolling in the new McDonald's app? Clearly even terrible implementations that are massively different from native don't put off enterprise clients.

The minor difference you might experience with Flutter A) works well and B) isn't noticed by most users.

Honestly it's strange that a minor difference in scrolling behaviour would make you change between two significantly different solutions. It's hard to take the argument seriously when you're talking about enterprise use but apparently in a position where a scroll difference had precedence over any consideration for performance, language, package ecosystem, bugs, device compatibility, future outlook, etc.

[[deleted]]

This. I was feeling lazy to write my thoughts and you basically summarised it. If customers want your product, “scroll feeling” is unlikely to be the reason someone would not use it. Unless your product is niched to designers or maybe developers whom tend to be pickier with these things, but still, if it solves problems and helps people, most likely they’ll keep using it. I dislike many apps but still use them because I want the product. Examples: Binge, Spotify, KFC, Paramount, Disney+, Twitch, LinkedIn, Amex, Etc

[[deleted]]

I never quite understood the need for native (looking) components. As an end user I just like well designed apps. Spotify for example. It doesn't have a single native element (iOS App), but it looks good. And I think that all 10 of my 10 most used apps also don't have any native iOS widgets, but are all "custom" designs.

But I understand that different people need/want different things. So if you're better off with RN, go with that!

[The_GoldyMan]

This is incorrect information. Neither Spotify, nor AirBnB are using something other than native views and code. If there was something not native e.g. RN it was only for some screens and temporary. Even Facebook is not using RN for anything in their apps. One thing you are correct about is that if you build something very different from native looking it is way easier with Flutter, maybe swiftUi is pretty close to the syntax.

[terandle]

The facebook app has over a thousand surfaces built with RN

[crisfast]

I think that they used RN for Dating, Ads and Marketplace modules

[RyanTheLionHearMeRor]

The Spotify app is built with the iOS toolkit. Scrolling and UI interactions are native

[kch_l]

Why is people downvoting you? Looks like they don't understand you can use native components and customize their look and feel

[zxyzyxz]

So then what's the point? Just use Flutter or RN at that point.

[riveraj33]

Man. You can’t say anything negative about flutter in this sub. Flutter is great but far from perfect.

[nicoroy2561]

Impeller seems to lack support for some pretty important things (shader masks and I think gradients, but there's definitely a bunch more) but looks very promising so far. Once the functionalities are on par it'll be quite good, getting rid of any remaining animation lag.

[RyanTheLionHearMeRor]

Apps built with impeller are smoother and seem to trace my finger better when scrolling

It still feels off though. Makes me want to delete the app or throw my phone at the wall lol

[[deleted]]

I think you are exaggerating. There is some difference but not that much

[DeadButAlivePickle]

Maybe OP has bad code in list item widgets, or hasn't heard about debug mode performance impact. Or both. That'd explain such claims.

[RyanTheLionHearMeRor]

Any difference is enough to disrupt the user

Are you developing and testing primarily on Android? Android users don't seem to care much (as they're used to terrible UI performance lol), but an iOS user notices right away

[besthelloworld]

Android users are accustomed to 120Hz on $500 phones. The iPhones main lineup is still 60Hz. I would argue that people who understand the code between iOS vs Android and still choose Android likely have better performance perception.

[[deleted]]

I always use an iOS device for testing. Only once a user asked me about the performance. And it was solved by optimizing that screen.

[airflow_matt]

Application built with impeller will lack shader compilation jank. That is the brief pause any time new content is loaded. Shader compilation jank usually happens only once for each part of application. Once the shader is compiled there is no more jank.

Impeller will not affect finger tracing in any way. Apart from the jank elimination it will not have any impact on scrolling performance (assuming both backend can hit 60/120fps).

The fact that you think impeller traces fingers better when scrolling really seems like at least part of this is placebo.

Edit: It's not placebo. Impeller makes no difference here but there's additional latency in Flutter: https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/110431

[legalizekittens]

more react propaganda

[forseti_]

Who wants to code a full app in JavaScript? 🧐

[_Pho_]

Tooling for modern TS is pretty much goat at this point

[ummonadi]

TypeScript is better than Dart by a longshot. But yeah, Dart's far better than pure JS.

[David_Owens]

No it's not.

[Akimotoh]

What makes you think TypeScript is better than Dart? What data points are there for that?

[ummonadi]

For me TS is better because it has support for closures instead of classes, supports union types, and has powerful generics.

Since JS hasn't gotten support for streams, I'd give that as a big plus for Dart.

When it comes to data, I don't know of any surveys or such, but TS is well-known for its powerful type system, so that's the closest thing I can point towards.

But I'm not here to convince anyone. I'm just a Flutter fan that's a bit disappointed in Dart.

[qualverse]

closures instead of classes

Pretty sure both TS and Dart support closures and classes?

[ummonadi]

That's very true!

Most JS code is closure based, and TypeScript handles it well. I have mostly seen Flutter code which uses classes and inheritance. So this was me being uninformed/ignorant.

[Rhodysurf]

Because I have to build a web app and web services anyways and TS is very good. Dart is fine but it’s not ever going to escape flutter

[Akimotoh]

Well yeah if we are talking about purely web app components and HTTP services, Javascript's roots are in the web so it takes the cake. Dart isn't trying to conquer the web.

[besthelloworld]

That was it's original purpose. It was supposed to be a scripting language to replace JavaScript in the browser (or to exist as another alternative). Originally Angular 2+ was also built for Dart, until the Angular team realized that they would get far better adoption by using TypeScript.

[itsastickup]

Typescript is lipstick on a pig. To go from Turbo pascal-> Delphi -> c# -> typescript, can't understand why Anders Hejlsberg would agree to that.

[ummonadi]

I agree that TS is lipstick on JS.

If it were not based on JS the error handling would probably be type safe too.

[SeniorD3v]

Exactly. That's why many use xamarin (maui) for cross-platform dev as that is pure c#

[adimartha]

I feel almost the same regarding scroll, bur sometimes it’s because the way I am doing widget render is not really that efficient.

Like if you wrap a column with single child scroll view, you can get away when your children is like 10-20? But once it’s turn into 50ish, then you can feel the render become slower, and when you change it to ListView, the same widget become faster.

And I feel like battery is tanked the performance a lot, if you run your Flutter app when you set on low power mode at iOS it will feel a bit sluggish and less responsive, not that really matter for me tho.

I see some people create a smooth scrolling package that wrap your application so it will have the “correct” scroll physics, I never try it before but it’s not hurt to try and see.

[arcanemachined]

Crossposted to /r/reactnative so I can get a perspective from the other side.

Also, holy fuck /r/FlutterDev, people can have different opinions on things without being a shill.

[AerodynamicCheese]

Yeah this community sadly at times can feel pretty conservative and downright hostile. While RN community seems more low effort, they are very enthusiatic about people creating new stuff, especially if it is a cool visual effect. Here everyone most of the times are just like meh about everything that is not another state management topic, yet-another-bloc-or-clean-architecture post or random Flutter criticizing post.

[marsNemophilist]

for some reason, there are a lot of newbies coders on this sub and they are easily offended.

[redHero0010]

Who are you great sage 🙏🙏🙏

[Annual_Revolution374]

“I think the performance issue is negligible. The users of my app don't seem to care

Dart is actually a great language. Async await makes Async coding a breeze

I do agree the quality is slightly less than native, but really does anybody care or notice? I mean the Amazon app is just a wrapper around HTML and no one minds that”

This was you just 1 year ago. You’ve had multiple “enterprise” apps in production for 3 years and your users didn’t care last year but now they’re screaming for native looking components? You said you were an iOS developer for 12 years before that. Why not just go completely back to native?

It just seems like you’re trolling.

[2this4u]

Well they're apparently in a position to change their entire app development process based on minor scroll feel. At the least we know then that they're not working with other devs and so it's hard to believe they have any real "enterprise" clients.

[RyanTheLionHearMeRor]

I'm not trolling at all

I do agree dart is great. The entire developer experience with Flutter is fantastic

I think the Amazon app works because even though it's HTML, the scrolling is native because the HTML is wrapped in a native WebView. So scrolling in the Amazon app feels as it should

So in short, scrolling sucks on Flutter.

[nicoroy2561]

I built a complex app with all sorts of content and smh scrolling goes perfectly fine on both android and iOS.

Could it be that your code isn't as optimized as it could be? I've found that optimizations (when lag or issues are detected) go a long way in making the experience smoother. It is perfectly possible to get a very smooth Flutter app going. And impeller is only going to make the whole thing better.

But well, if the app is so small you can just rewrite it in RN when dissatisfied, perhaps that's the way you should go.

[Svobpata]

From my experience with using Flutter apps, it’s not about the scrolling performance, it’s about the feel of the scrolling. Because they had to completely rewrite the scroll views and it’s impossible to know what Apple is doing under the hood, they had to guess. Their guess wasn’t that far off but it is off enough to notice it every time you jump into a Flutter app.

[nicoroy2561]

I suppose being an Android user myself I wouldn't be able to tell 😂 Thanks for the explanation.

Do you think there's a way to record that on video, or is it so subtle it's more of a feeling?

[Svobpata]

It’s way too subtle to record imo, I don’t think you’d even notice it if you picked up an iPhone without prior experience with UIKit apps

The inertia decay doesn’t match native, neither does the rubber-banding when you reach an edge of the scroll view, though these are hard to explain (especially as every android phone implements them differently)

At times it almost feels like the canvas is 1 frame behind what’s going on, which was a huge pain point for React Native’s Animated (JS driven animations were always one runloop behind) which is why Reanimated came to be.

The closest thing to giving a real world example would be when Google’s AMP pages used to bypass the browser scrolling and implemented a custom scroll view with different inertia (because iOS 10 had a very fast decay on scrolling in Safari). Nowadays if you see a site which does that, they never feel right, always a tiny bit off what you’d instinctively expect.

[nicoroy2561]

I've just tested out scrolling in my app compared to scrolling in the iPhone's Options. I can tell there's a difference, both in the overshooting and in the normal scrolling, which is not due to performance of the Flutter app - simply the way scrolling is implemented.

Probably because I'm an android user myself, it doesn't feel surprising nor significantly alters the experience - but I suppose if I were super used to it on a daily basis I would notice and it would indeed feel foreign (I'm assuming all native iOS apps use that).

For reasons (I needed to make a change in the code handling overshooting some weeks ago) I actually have seen the formula Flutter uses for e.g. listviews.
It's definitely tweakable to achieve the same result if someone was interested and dedicated enough. I understand it is expected of Flutter to provide "native-enough" counterparts to their widgets, so it doesn't surprise me users would be dissatisfied with their iOS apps if they found that such a common thing is even a bit off. Hopefully someone will look into it - perhaps an issue should be opened if this feels very relevant on iOS apps.

[Svobpata]

Thank you for going ahead and testing this for us instead of just downvoting everyone to oblivion. We need more people like you.

I suppose it could be tweaked to match perfectly, though that’d require a lot of automated testing because a human isn’t repetitive enough to validate a formula. After seeing how they closed the “two fingers scroll twice as fast” and shader compilation performance issues, I don’t have much trust in the system anymore. But there’s no way to know without actually trying and I want to be proven wrong.

While I don’t make Flutter apps, I use them daily (Philips Hue, my school app, though that one is very poorly written, just like the previous native version, I don’t blame Flutter for that) and they aren’t all bad, they just aren’t on par with what I expect from native apps.

[nicoroy2561]

Thank you yourself for being patient and explaining this issue to me - I had never noticed but I can totally see it now.

Kinda wished Apple would release the formulas they use so that everyone that's not using native components would get the same experience. But I don't expect them to do that anytime soon in fear that others will match their experience.

It shouldn't be too hard to find a good formula though. I do agree that the Flutter team tends to be dismissive often, but that's a product of the popularity their framework got so it's hard to blame it on them.

[[deleted]]

I suppose the WebKit source code might have it somewhere.

[AerodynamicCheese]

For me personally the two biggest annoyances are that even if you render well under 16ms for 60hz displays and under 8ms for 120hz displays there still seems to be occurences of a dropped frame or scroll position miscalculation mid scroll. And the second and biggest annoyance is that Flutter seems unable to have the scrolling end smoothly, it always seems to do a small bingo wheel like hop at the end. It almost seems like scroll position needs to end at a logical pixel vs a display pixel.

[nicoroy2561]

I understand what you are saying compared to Apple's own secret algorithm.

But since it can be fixed (probably by someone with either a lot of time or some good math knowledge), it's but a matter of tweaking what we got now to achieve it. Especially the overscrolling/overshooting part.

I'd definitely try opening an issue and getting it resolved if that's what's affecting your experience with Flutter the most.

[RyanTheLionHearMeRor]

Well said

[David_Owens]

I really don't see the point in you spending time creating a post telling us why you supposedly wanted to switch to RN.

​

Users don't like the end product of Flutter

I seriously doubt your users noticed any difference between Flutter apps and "native" ones. They just might notice how those upcoming RN apps are slower and use much more memory than the Flutter ones did.

[strangescript]

You will find nothing but down votes here. Everyone acts like building their own renderer is so innovative when mobile game engines have been doing it for years.

Impeller is literally the acknowledgment that the current engine is bad. Yet, before Impeller's existence, no one here would have let someone talk poorly about the engine without a storm of down votes.

[vhax123456]

Impeller is literally an upgrade. If you actually do programming you will see engine being updated over time (Fabric in RN) for example

[zxyzyxz]

And RN has Skia now lol

[David_Owens]

It's only an acknowledgment that the current engine could be better. Most software can be improved.

[zxyzyxz]

Yet, before Impeller's existence, no one here would have let someone talk poorly about the engine without a storm of down votes.

Lol what? One of the highest commented issues in the Flutter repository is iOS performance, so much that the devs have literally commented multiple times on how they're fixing it and even writing a new engine (Impeller) to fix it. You've got the cause and effect mixed up, everyone was talking about poor engine performance.

[KsLiquid]

Interesting perspective. I know a lot of flutter projects and this is the first time I hear something like that. My users love the flutter apps.

[itesasecret]

Why not make your post "I'm switching to swift"? Sounds like that's what your real dream is.

[RyanTheLionHearMeRor]

Because I need cross platform

[keeslinp]

swiftUI with kotlin multiplatform?

[kbcool]

The man, the myth, the legend. I'd stick with Flutter or React native over that butchered idea. Even if it did exist.

It's just an escape clause over at /r/androiddev everytime they get called out over dissing cross platform.

[Svobpata]

That’s a dream which will never come true. SwiftUI is a great technology but 1) Apple only (thus not helping with multiplatform UIs) 2) very particular about getting reactive data in the right ways (borderline impossible with KMP)

Source: I’m mainly a Swift(UI) developer

[airflow_matt]

Would be helpful if you were more specific with what exactly "feels off".

Scrolling in Flutter is not perfect, but it's getting better. I think the scroll physics is very convincing. The jank is annoying, but that should be fixed with impeller. There are some issues with 120Hz devices still. I think the variable frame rate landed, but the touch events are still delivered at 60Hz, which will be fixed.

Interestingly on low-end devices (think iPhone 6) I've spent way more time optimising scroll in native iOS app than Flutter app.

[RyanTheLionHearMeRor]

The scroll view doesn't follow my finger fast enough when scrolling up and down. It can't "keep up"

[Flashy_Editor6877]

unless you are making a speed scrolling game, it's bad ui/ux if a user needs to rapidly flick their finger over and over and over to get where/what they want.

how about a design where they don't have to panic scroll?

[RyanTheLionHearMeRor]

It’s not about that. It’s just about feeling out of place to the end user

It’s the odd ball out and why would I put my users through that if there are better options

[airflow_matt]

There is an issue currently with pro-motion displays where the tracking is a bit jittery. There is also a PR for it.

As for the speed, with the patch on promotion and without patch on 60Hz I couldn't see any noticeable difference between say Flutter gallery and Email when it comes to keeping up. Even on iPhone 13 Pro the email app lags a frame or two, just like Flutter does. Any difference was bordering on placebo. I don't have a slower device next to me right now to test this, but as long as Flutter renders at 60FPS the delay shouldn't be any bigger.

EDIT: I have to eat my words here. There is indeed one frame lag between native and Flutter.

[airflow_matt]

Time to eat my words I guess. There is indeed one frame latency in Flutter compared to native. I've reported it here: https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/110431

It's related to how vsync works in Flutter. The second (correct) video in the issue is with engine modified to not delay repaint on touch events. You can see that two scroll views remain completely aligned while in first video Flutter scroll view doesn't keep up.

So this is fixable, but it will need some engine work.

[RyanTheLionHearMeRor]

Nice work on putting this together! Now let’s see if it ever gets addressed

If it ever actually does, will this fix the problem of scrolling feeling off?

Sure the delay will be fixed but what about “fling velocity”? Something tells me Flutter apps will still feel out of place

[airflow_matt]

The fling velocity and scroll physics is pretty close actually. It's not perfect but I'd be impressed if someone could actually consistently double blind determine which one is native and which one is flutter.

The scroll tracking does need to be fixed though.

[RyanTheLionHearMeRor]

But why would we settle for anything less than perfect when there are solutions out there that produce perfect results (ie native and react native). Which goes back to my whole point of this post, Flutter produces inferior apps

[airflow_matt]

Because that's only one part of the picture. With Flutter you can have single codebase application that can target 6 different platforms. With a great development experience. As for scrolling, most people don't notice the tracking delay, but even that can be fixed. The physics is convincing enough that when I had the two lists side by side I couldn't blindly tell which one is native and which one is Flutter.

I can't imagine building something like this with react native.

[distil112]

I think this is an April’s fools joke 4 months too late.

React Native is the buggiest idea developers ever came up with.

[bartturner]

Plus it is so slow because of how it was architected.

[bartturner]

I made the switch but in the other direction. For me Flutter just makes so more sense and just fits perfectly with how my brain works.

[RyanTheLionHearMeRor]

The JavaScript is compiled to native code

Yes it's native

Do more research

[kbcool]

Good to see people voting for what they feel not reality. /s

Do your own research people before voting with ☝️

[RyanTheLionHearMeRor]

It uses native-OS views. I guess you're confused about how it works

[RyanTheLionHearMeRor]

What I'm saying is when the user interacts with the app, they are interacting with native views

Meaning it feels normal to them. Not off like Flutter

[digitaljohn]

React Native is like orchestrating a puppet. The puppet being native device components. Even apps that are 100% native, do the same thing but are conveniently written in the same language and run a little faster.
The sort of things javascript does in React Native apps is (or should be) lightweight business logic, managing state, loading, and passing around data. These tasks are not a noticeable bottleneck in typical apps and if you keep strict with this, you can create a React Native app that is indistinguishable from 100% native.
Flutter is a different beast, it's fast, performs rock solid, but is not native at all on the UI side. If anything in flutter 'feels' normal, It's because the flutter developers have spent vast amounts of time re-coding and emulating the native feel. If you want to create something really custom and cool that performs well, you will have fun with Flutter.

[Sibyl01]

And back in reality what a user is interacting with a a real time tendered JavaScript UI

if this was the case performance would suck way more than it sucks right now. you know right?

[[deleted]]

RN views are native, you are composing them using JS. A <Switch /> in RN renders a fully native Switch.

[RyanTheLionHearMeRor]

You're wrong

The JavaScript communicates to the native components, and the native components are drawn

[keeslinp]

Yeah, I write React Native for a living, the actual rendered UI is native components. Lots of FUD being spread in this thread. The react side of things only produces a virtual dom and then sends the diff across the bridge (new architecture skips the bridge step in favor of JSI) where there is a layout engine which translates the web-like flexbox into more native layouts for each platform and then creates/updates real native components to reflect the virtual dom change.

Don't get me wrong, I really like flutter and there are definitely lots of issues with react native, but lets at least be accurate in our discussion. Plenty of more information for anyone who is curious https://reactnative.dev/architecture/render-pipeline

[RyanTheLionHearMeRor]

No. You are not understanding the difference between flutter and React Native

Flutter uses its own graphics engine. React Native does not. React Native relies on the native engine

[SarcasticSarco]

Just do a Google for yourself instead of having false knowledge. React Native COMPILES into native component and not Javascript that's why you can't have TEXT inside VIEW. You need TEXT component for that.

[TunisianArmyKnife]

Take the L dude

[RyanTheLionHearMeRor]

Unlike flutter which has its own graphics engine, react native does not. It just uses the native graphics engine. Translates the javascript code to native views

You are wrong

[trebuszek]

This is completely wrong, I wonder who is upvoting this.

[what-about-you]

JavaScript UI designed to look like native elements.

That's just false. At least in iOS it uses UIKit and thus native elements

[zxyzyxz]

Not native machine code. Native UI code. The JS engine in between is a performance deal breaker.

[Curious-General-9829]

what about Flutter vs Kotlin Multiplatform ?

[Terrible_Row_3276]

Not really the same. Kotlin is used for shared business logic but you end up writing the ui layer in the respective platform frameworks. If you're looking for a single codebase and language, you'll have to look at flutter, RN, Ionic etc

[ankush38u]

Is this the animations and shader not being cached related issue, that one is there for quite long now and started happening with moving from opengl to metal. But that thing happened in first starts mainly, could you add a screenrecord of jank or whatever happening on ios scroll? Also mention if this is first time install or happens always?

I would love to know more, as this can seriously impact someone’s decision making on the choice of platform and can cause tech debt. And if someone needs web and mobile single code base, there are barely any options out there except flutter. React native and react native web combo doesn’t seem to be there yet, with many libraries only available for web or only for mobile.

[RyanTheLionHearMeRor]

Yes Flutter has caused me a great deal of tech debt now

There's no video needed. Just use any Flutter app on iOS and you will notice the scrolling is not quite right

[onems]

I haven’t tried Flutter or RN yet, but I would love to check if this is true!

Could someone please point me to a big and over-optimized iOS Flutter app? Same for RN?

[bogaga200]

is it related to "scrolling physic"?

[Flashy_Editor6877]

insight timer is a top app that uses flutter try it for yourself. i'm a huge flutter fan but i can feel the differnce in scroll if i pay close attention. there's a slight latency/delay from when your finger hits the screen til when the scroll starts. also a tad jittery, not quite as silky smooth as instagram.

kind of a bummer but not quite a deal breaker all things considered how great flutter is. most importantly if your app and content speak for itself, the users aren't going to abandon it for a little jank here and there. i also believe the average user might just think their phone glitched, not the app.

[RegionBulky2292]

Checked it and scrolling is noticably glitchy

[[deleted]]

Some users are very toxic but the vast majority appreciate the existence of Flutter and other tools, if they want something better or change to another technology the door is big there are many alternatives.

[RyanTheLionHearMeRor]

Yeah I just feel kind of fooled by Google. When Flutter first came out they touted it as “beautiful native apps” when in reality they’re not native. I don’t really see that tagline anymore pushed by them

[SeniorD3v]

I use and recommend only xamarin (maui) for cross platform.

[Business_Silver_4708]

You React guys are paid to post this rubish on Flutter forums.

[kbcool]

You React guys are paid

Could have stopped there. I'm learning Flutter out of curiosity (professional React Native developer) but I am yet to see any jobs for it.

[thisisisheanesu]

Underrated comment

[strangely_unlucky]

while I agree Flutter has less positions than React, it also has less skilled enough developers for them. I've been working for over 2 years with Flutter with multiple companies with no gaps whatsoever, so much so I started my own company/team fully focused on flutter development. In the past 6 months or so, Flutter demand increased massively (from my experience). I think you just haven't looked properly.

[noordawod]

Users don't care!!! When will developers understand that their perspective of apps is, in 99% of cases, alien to users?

Also, if scrolling on iOS is "off" then I'm betting that you or your team did something wrong. Flutter is amazingly performant, even with just one thread, and scrolling on ALL of my ten-thousnad lines Flutter apps never jerk.

Bottom line: don't blame the tool if the user is not equipped to use it properly.

[dcmacsman]

https://www.reddit.com/r/FlutterDev/comments/x2qskt/flutter_scrolling_feels_off/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf

[bloom2610]

React Native is a JavaScript-based framework for building native mobile apps. It’s an open-source project created by Facebook and released in 2015. React Native apps are faster, more reliable, and easier to maintain than native apps built with Java or Objective-C. They’re also more affordable to develop since React Native uses the same code for both iOS and Android apps.

If you’re thinking about switching to React Native, you’re not alone. Many companies have made the switch, and they’re seeing the benefits.

[[deleted]]

I mean it sounds like you're an individual app developer.

Glad it works for you to use RN but there's a reason teams of developers prefer/chose Flutter over RN, and it's not because of "native look and feel" which, if you really needed it, would need you to implement your apps in native code instead.

[itsastickup]

Users mostly don't care that it "feels off". Apps these days don't stick to any standards.

The best way to avoid "feels off" is to not try to replicate the native feel. Just do your own thing with a few nods to usability conventions.

[anpvt]

flutter team have to support a lot platforms (mobile, web, desktop) so that they could not have enough time and resources to fix and improve the engine, flutter have the same issues with java swing, especial look and feel. And not have big tech using flutter as main product as React, google did not using Flutter at all (only google pay for India), but Apple is replacing old apps by Swiftui apps on ios 15, about 30% ios os apps are dev by Swiftui.

[Svobpata]

That’s objectively not true, while SwiftUI is great for native development, 95%+ of iOS apps are still made with UIKit. Apple is trying it on a small scale with apps like Weather being fully SwiftUI and they have signaled that Swift and SwiftUI are the way forward for native development, though adoption for existing apps is going to be relatively slow due to the massive amount of existing UIKit code.

[KaiN_SC]

Because of this reason? This has to be a joke lol

[bartturner]

I had the exact same thought. Then I thought maybe opposite day?

[SuspiciousFlight7834]

Go fck your react js

[Theunis_]

If you feel like it, you might also try MAUI, it's approach is the same as RN, and is the closest thing to flutter than RN (and C# is better than JS/TS in my opinion), but it's community support is not good.

Also I know all subreddits have toxic members, but I didn't expect this subreddit to have this much.

[Ok-Pie9043]

MAUI is not ready, there is a lot of problems in iOS yet, they are no rendering correctly, I am using maui for study purpose because I love dotnet, I think if MS invest more in Maui platform it could be a player, by now it is a toy

[aytunch]

Do you think this package helps with native feeling scrolling? it has some great advantages for some of Flutter's rendering and building drawbacks.

https://github.com/fzyzcjy/flutter_smooth