> But these have all the same problems eventually.
I've maintainted a Flutter app and it's 10% of the maintenance of a normal Android or iOS app. The only real breaking change they had in 6 years was the switch to strict typing.
We had a bunch of sdk users who couldn't port over our Android sdk because of "Unsupported class file major version 65" so we ended up making a flutter plugin for them rather than downgrading the native Android versions. I would expect many sdk devs to not care enough to do this, especially the open source ones.
All the changes on these platforms have been done thanklessly by someone. Before this, someone was paid to do it, so they might not need the thanks. But I saw how fast Cordova unraveled after Apache announced they were dropping support.
There's the frameworks like GetX too which have slowed down recently. We've been removing them from the code and replacing them.
So, are the Flutter library maintainers so good that they are able to abstract out all the changes that are happening to Android system libraries, Google's helper libraries, and the restrictions on the underlying platform?
90% of android apps are equally painless to maintain, all they request is the INTERNET permission.
Android went from a free for all to considering that maybe we should ask the user before granting full access to all of their files without warning. In addition, the upgrade paths are well documented, and give you multiple years to migrate.
but the underlying native stuff still creates a problem. we're on an old version of Flutter without any need to upgrade but Apple has an updated Privacy Manifest requirements that forced us to update our dependencies purely only for the manifest. Workarounds are barely mentioned, although they exist.
I've maintainted a Flutter app and it's 10% of the maintenance of a normal Android or iOS app. The only real breaking change they had in 6 years was the switch to strict typing.