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In January, I created a post where I sang Flutter’s praises over Android native. Three months later, does this still hold true?

First, let me give you a brief background. I launched my app back in 2013 on Android and the app has naturally grown from there. Late in 2018, I decided to do a full rewrite of the app in Flutter (with two things in mind: make the app more future-proof and ability to expand to iOS). I soft-launched on iOS in mid-December and went onto Android at the end of December. Despite a few hiccups (such as forgotten or missed features!), it generally went okay.

As of today, only about 6% of my Android user base is still on the old Android native app. I have around 2700 active users a day, so not massive, but it is a well-used app. Almost 4 months of constant hammering by users should give me a good flavour of what it is like to run a Flutter app in production.

What is still good?

Apple (almost for free): Being able to launch my app on Apple is definitely worthwhile. Revenue and use isn’t exactly where I want it to be, but I’m on the platform, so that is 100% further ahead than I was before Flutter. Apart from the nuances in terms of the iOS UX, I haven’t experienced any difference between the two platforms. It is great to do all of my development on Android and it just works on Apple.

Rapid developement: I have managed to add several new features to my app (including some fairly complex new features) which I would never have been able to achieve so quickly in Android native. And I also got this on Apple, almost for free. It may also be a sign of how well I architected my app, but this is also because Flutter and Dart allows this.

Community: The Flutter community is big and growing exponentially. Help is always at hand and I see new tutorials and walkthroughs coming out daily.

What’s not so good?

Dependency hell: I have found myself stuck in some dependency hell. I have one library which hasn’t updated and it causes a bad domino effect. I thought it was easier to manage in Dart, but appears not so. It took a fair amount of effort to unpick bit by bit and find the offending library.

Incomplete Google features: Further to the dependency hell I mention above, Google’s own features are still incomplete. Their maps are not usable yet, so I’ve had to use another package called “flutter_maps”, which is currently causing my dependency hell.

More incomplete Google features: AdMob is not really incomplete, rather just incompatible with the way that Flutter is meant to work. The library hasn’t been updated since February and I have to use awkward workarounds. I’ve had a really good explanation by Andrew Brogdon after I raised the issue on a Flutter Youtube video, but it is still frustrating that we are where we are with this. Nowhere.

Null handling: I’m not sure if it recently changed or if I just didn’t notice before, but I preferred the way that Dart handled nulls in that it won’t fatally blow up and just carry on. I had some really bad issues recently where it would just stop running parts of my code when I accidently tried doing something with a null. No errors, no nothing. It would literally just skip the rest of the function without throwing anything. It took hours to unpick and I would honestly have preferred the app to just crash instead.

Instability: I started using the stable channel of Flutter, so that I could keep up to the latest versions of Flutter, but without too much risk of things going wrong. Unfortunately, a fairly bad regression issue has appeared and it is causing some frustration (mostly just that Samsung decided to suspend my app).

Other weird bugs: This issue has appeared most than 4000 times in my app for more than 350 users. It has proven impossible for me to reproduce, but I can see it happening. I’ve had a number of other weird issues also occur. A more stable framework would not have these sorts of issues.

Do I still prefer Flutter?

Absolutely, I still prefer Flutter. I know that on balance, it appears from the above lists that I have more complaints about Flutter than praise, but this is not accurate. I simply recognise the current flaws with Flutter, but I still believe that the future is bright. Using Flutter, I believe that I can keep on expanding my app and giving my users all of the great experiences they are after.

