This time last year I published an article with my impressions of React Native, which was all the rage in 2016 and 2017, with companies such as Facebook, Instagram, Tesla, Walmart, Airbnb, Skype and more investigating it, or even actually implementing apps (or subsections) with it.

But this year, React Native seems to be losing (or have already lost) much of its appeal, with some notable companies have announced they are abandoning it (check out this article by Airbnb’s Gabriel Peal, or this other one by Udacity’s Nate Ebel). Talking to developers and judging from what’s being published in articles, or from what recruiters look for on LinkedIn, it would appear that it’s just not that hot anymore. To be clear though, it’s not dead and the fact that it didn’t work so well for some companies doesn’t mean that it won’t work for others. Many of these companies used it on subsections of their apps rather than on all of it, which is one of the reasons it was so complex to use. However, one can’t deny that if big companies that contribute to the popularity of a technology (by writing about it and creating popular open-source libraries for it) eventually decide to leave it, it has an impact on the community. At the very minimum, teams that were previously on the fence about using it had an easier decision to make, using posts such as the above to back up their arguments.

But in 2017 something else happened. Google publicly released an early alpha version of its own cross-platform technology for mobile apps, Flutter, during the Google IO developers conference. Fast forward to this year’s conference and the brand announced that Flutter was ready for production and at the end of September it had a Release Preview 2. Read the full announcement on its blog — here are just some highlights:

The theme for this last release is pixel-perfect iOS apps (while the focus previously had mostly been on Android’s Material Design). Note the app’s reduced package size, with a minimal Android app now just 4.7MB when built in release mode. Flutter, which has been open-source since the beginning, entered the list of the top 50 most active repos on GitHub. Some big companies are using it, such as as Alibaba (Android, iOS), Tencent (Android, iOS), and Google Ads (Android, iOS). There’s also a video on how Alibaba used Flutter to build its Xianyu app (Android, iOS), currently used by more than 50 million customers in China. This chart shows how Flutter is getting a lot of momentum on Stack Overflow:

So, this intrigued me enough to check it out, understand what it is all about, and create a real application with it (because, as always, just reading the documentation is not enough to get a real feeling of something new). It definitely helped that the last Friday of the month at ASOS is Tech Develops, where the entire tech department — almost a thousand people — are free to investigate any new tech we’re interested in.

You see some screens (for both Android and iOS) at the top of this page, and can download the Android version from the Play Store — feedback is appreciated!

What is Flutter and what does it do?