I want to develop cross-platform applications with a single easy to understand and safe code base. With .NET’s MAUI on the horizon, you would think I would have gravitate to it in a heartbeat, given my previous article. Don’t get me wrong, I have tried out some of the previews. However, there are some caveats: Linux support isn’t planned and macOS development requires Big Sur or later as of Preview 4.
While I have no problem working with proprietary software and operating systems, Linux is always something I account for when developing software or games. Big Sur support is a bit of an issue for me. I’m using an 2013 iMac that is technically capable of running it without any additional hacks but is not officially supported by Apple. Hackers suspect it’s related to reported issues regarding the optional Fusion drive by those who have attempted to install Big Sur on that model.
Due to my fanfare over MAUI, Flutter wasn’t necessarily on my radar. Then a friend shared an article about Ubuntu getting a new installer that’s written in Flutter, and my interest started to peak. It wasn’t until another friend began writing an application for his company using the framework that stirred up my curiosity that I began to try it out.
Flutter is like MAUI. You use one code base to write a graphical applications for each respective platform. It uses the Reactive paradigm, supports hot reloading, everything is a widget — everything. The ability to develop and run your application on iOS and Android, plus macOS, Windows and Linux, is not only impressive but really nice.
Dart
Of course, I can’t talk about Flutter without mentioning Dart. Dart was Google’s attempt into addressing the problems with Javascript — this was before WebAssembly, mind you. However, it was met with criticism over potentially fragmenting the web and was rewritten to compile down to Javascript. Somewhere along the way Flutter was born after that.
I’ve always used ether C# and Rust while dabbling on other languages like Swift and Go. I was indifferent on the language, at the time. Support for null-safety in 2.12 helped contribute to me trying out Dart and Flutter.
My experience with Dart, so far, has been pretty great. Never thought I’d be writing a graphical application entirely from VS Code — I’ve been spoiled by IDEs — but that’s exactly what I’ve been doing!
Adoption
Unsurprisingly, Google is eating their own dog food with Flutter. Stadia, Ads and Assistant all use it, according to their Showcase. What is somewhat shocking is that Flutter powers Fuschia’s interface.
I’ve passed on Google’s I/O for many years due to my issues related with the company. So you can color more than surprised when I discovered they talked about Flutter this year. I feel like they’re getting ready for Fuschia to go mainstream soon, given it just launched on Nest Hubs after I/O ended.
But what’s really interesting is Samsung has started porting Flutter to their Tizen platform, likely due to the merging of Wear OS and Tizen platform. It already has support for Xamarin. Unfortunately, you can only develop those applications from Windows. This doesn’t seem to be the case with the Flutter port, according to the source code.
While MAUI’s future remains uncertain until its released, Google already has quite a head start with Flutter. It’ll be interesting to see how these two compete. Unfortunately, I may have to sit MAUI out in favor of Flutter, due to the above mentioned issues, related to me.
