We are in the process of converting our native apps (+10m daily users) to javascript apps. We did some extensive testing last year and our conclusion is that the current hardware (also 3 year old devices) are powerful enough to run these apps.
User experience is identical in the way we build them. Full client side rendering it means.
We find the eco system of mainly Android extremely bloated and complex. Developing in one code base with just minor platform specific differences is so much better. Things like styling the UI: Css is just king compared to both Android and iOS native solutions. Of course certain things remain native. Push notifications, auth logins, ads and some other minor things. I cant wait to see our apps filly webbased.
Out of curiosity, in which way didn't Flutter fulfill your need? I've been doing Flutter dev since a couple of months back and it's been a sweet ride so far.
There is of course some hiccups but with no major obstacle.
- Rendering to web is (for all practical purposes) entirely broken.
- DNS is broken (because Google wants to have its own version of the internet).
- TLS is broken (for the same reason as above).
- Layout is limited (far too much, in comparison to web).
- Keyboard interaction is (practically) barebones.
- State management is (practically) one-style only.
TBH, that last point applies to nearly all of Flutter. You get a strong feeling that the only way to do anything is the Google-blessed method and nothing else. If you need anything done differently, just don't.
> Rendering to web is (for all practical purposes) entirely broken.
Can you expand on how exactly it "entirely broken"? I use it two years in production apps, and it's been amazing. The look and feel is pixel-to-pixel perfect to the native apps and slightly different from the "native browser", but it doesn't matter to users.
> DNS is broken, TLS is broken
))) right. IP is broken too )
> Layout is limited (far too much, in comparison to web).
Flutter not just designed to give you full control over layouts and its constraints in an efficient way (so widgets don't get rerendered or sizes don't get recalculated redundantly), it has custom painters and shaders and let you create completely custom layouts, including high-fps games. How is this more limited then DOM and "<a href target="_blank">" legacy?
> Keyboard interaction is (practically) barebones.
What's missing?
> State management is (practically) one-style only.
At this point I have a strong suspicion that you're trolling. State management in Flutter is a notoriously overpopulated field, with a whole zoo of officially endorsed approaches (for different cases and/or app sizes). Actually, if you would mention this as a main argument (no one-style state management) – I would agree with your point.
I doubt there is much difference between javs dalvik runtime on Android and a browser javascript runtime. For some tasks the browser runtime is maybe even more optimized.
