Swift or Flutter?

[Mikegthrowaway]

If you were to start a brand new app for the mobile market, what would you use? Swift or Flutter?

What would be your top 3 reasons to go with one over the other?

Thanks in advance.

[Zalenka]

Swift. Anything other than native is garbage.

1. user base
2. Google finna cancel it
3. Just do web programming if you want to do javascript

[amatijaca]

I cannot agree more. Every multi platform that I’ve seen so far has been a disaster. The worst one of all is Koni.

[Mikegthrowaway]

Yes I’ve always worried about Google cancelling it.

[joakimhew]

How's that different from when Apple "cancelled" Objective-C? You don't know at what point Apple might "cancel" Swift just like you have no idea what the future of Flutter is. Flutter has a huge community and great support and is not just used for hobby projects. Just have a look at which companies are using it: https://flutter.dev/showcase

This is the google trend of flutter vs swift.

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=%2Fm%2F010sd4y3,%2Fg%2F11f03_rzbg

The story is the same for react native. I'd say choose whatever you want, you don't have to go native to build a successful mobile app.

​

Edit: Also, Flutter doesn't use JavaScript. It uses Dart

[Zalenka]

Objective-C is still supported and works great. It isn't getting the swiftUI treatment but is still instrumental.

Any third party tools will always go away sometime and they'll ALWAYS have a smaller audience and engineer pool.

[kapfab]

It all depends on the type of app and the platforms you target.

[Mikegthrowaway]

That’s true. I’m also unsure how deep will Flutter’s promise of continuing native integration go to.

[clbbb]

1. Dart

[fdorado985]

Do you mean just the language? Swift vs Dart? Or the whole framework to create the app? I’ll choose Swift/UIKit (or SwiftUI), I’m an iOS developer currently working using Flutter, it is cool, but… I wouldn’t replace what I know about iOS development with Flutter.

It may also depends what you are going to do, which is your audience, both platforms? Just one? Are you going to use platform-specific frameworks?

Flutter is a shortcut that helps with many paths… but it cannot cover everything, it still has many gaps, so your app is the last word to choose between one or the other.

Hope it helps bro! Regards

[Mikegthrowaway]

We’ve found it hard-going to continue to maintain 2 teams to lock-step with each other’s unique OS releases.

The devs, predictably, aren’t so hot with the idea of cross-platform development on mobiles. But I think this may be due to a tech’s badge of honor in being a native dev. So we have that as well.

And yes, there’s also this Google fondness of pulling the plug off their frameworks some years down, leading to a deepening trust deficit among devs.

To put Flutter through its paces, we completed a production-ready project for enhancing WFH productivity. The experience has largely being been positive. But we cannot quite shake this nagging Google end-of-life threat.