The Case for Flutter

I am really encouraged by the feedback and ongoing questions and conversations after my talk a few weeks ago on my investigations into Flutter, and my first Flutter app in the app stores, and the learnings (good and bad) from all of it. I have a lot of notes that I wanted to compile, for myself and others, that could be helpful for others going through a similar evaluation and journey — that is, my “Case for Flutter”.

TL;DR — I really have grown to really like Flutter, and while it is still rough around some of the edges, I think it makes some significant steps forward toward a mobile framework that works well for all stakeholders.

Longer answer will be in 5–6 different posts, that I’ve got the notes and outlines for, but I’ll compile soon into separate posts. These cover how I came to my own decisions about Flutter and my mental-model for the architecture and features that are must-haves.

A brief background on me — I started coding “mobile apps” 25 years ago this fall with a Newton MessagePad 100 and NewtonScript, and have built apps on Windows CE, iOS/ObjC, Android/Java, Windows Phone 7/8, PhoneGap, Xamarin Native, and Xamarin.Forms. No Palm, Blackberry, React, or a few others, but a pretty good variety of languages and platforms over quite a few years. Flutter is evolutionary in many respects, but has some revolutionary new capabilities that make it unique in the emerging mobile frameworks.

So let me summarize 5–6 conversations with good old friends, and some new friends, over the last month or so, and some content from my conference presentation, to add my voice to this online conversation. Just my $.02, and very open to ongoing discussions about any of this.

The upcoming (ASAP) linked-posts will be …

• Mobile-Oriented Architecture
• The ~8 Mobile Meta Apps
• What Do Developers Want in a Mobile Framework?
• People-Friendly Framework
• Flutter the Hard Way — Code Generation / Redux
• Conclusions / Way Forward

Next

First up — Mobile-Oriented Architecture.

One previous post “Flutter Talk Links”, that will not make much sense (does one refactor blog posts? — probably) out of the context of my talk, but does include some good links to further Flutter info.

As always — the opinions and ideas expressed here are my own, and not those of my employer, friends, wife, dog(s) — I am in no way affiliated with any of the companies mentioned here and not compensated, compelled, or encouraged in any way to write.