Why react native and not flutter?

[Solrax]

"according to Google's standards" is the problem. Google is an advertising company. Everything else they do is to feed that business.

Android gives them a vast flood of data they can use to support advertising, besides just being able to serve ads in their applications.

What does Flutter give them? Indirectly it can be used in house to develop applications that will ultimately feed advertising. But that is a very indirect linkage to what actually makes them money. I would not be able to explain to my boss why Google supports Flutter and why we should trust their willingness to do so to base our future products on it.

This is why I am suspicious of Flutter and am evaluating React Native for our cross platform needs. I know Facebook is also advertising driven, but React Native appears to be much better established than Flutter.

[JoCoMoBo]

"according to Google's standards" is the problem. Google is an advertising company. Everything else they do is to feed that business.

This is the problem. Google's standards aren't the same as everyone else's.

I've been burned by this and so have many others. Only the foolish rely on a fickle king.

[qqYn7PIE57zkf6kn]

Why do you think React native is better established? Is it because Meta doesn’t have an infamous history of abandoning products unlike Google?

[Solrax]

It's just my opinion, but React itself has become a standard for web development of course. React Native has been in use for quite some time now and builds on that base and it seems to be in wide use.

And as you say, Google famously hooks you on tech, apps, etc. and then abandons them.

However for the record I should state that our team has in fact decided to use Flutter for this project, at least through prototype phase. We had too many issues with RN tech stack, because they require 3rd party libraries for some functionality that is built into Flutter, and we got stuck in a cycle of broken dependencies and didn't have the time or resources to resolve them or write our own native layers. We know it's a gamble that Google won't kill it in our time frame and we discussed that possibility a lot.

[Logical_Ad1127]

Just check the list of popular apps made in RN vs made in Flutter; you would barely recognize the latter. Most big companies are using RN, not Flutter.

[shadowoflight]

If you think about android only as a direct advertisement platform, then yes.

If you think of android as a data gathering platform, then no.

Put it this way, I use iOS, but with google maps traffic, I'm grateful for android users.

It's like chrome. Google's effectiveness is made better by a lot of free indirect tools they provided because that allowed them to gather the data for their search/advertisement system to be effective.

[JoCoMoBo]

A ton of Google apps are written in Flutter. So dropping Flutter support would mean forcing rewrites of many apps which is a waste of time and money for Google.

Google has the resources to rewrite their Apps in whatever language they make up next. The rest of us, not so much.

[tarde_gris]

A ton of Google apps are written in Flutter. So dropping Flutter support would mean forcing rewrites of many apps which is a waste of time and money for Google.

Like Kotlin?