Flutter VS Introducing .NET Multi-platform App UI (MAUI)

Flutter

Dart/Flutter: I chose the Dart language and the Flutter framework because I already have experience with these technologies and was looking for a solution that would allow the creation of an app for both iOS and Android without needing to create two separate codes.

Before starting the tutorial on developing a personal target tracking application with Flutter, Riverpod, Strapi, and GraphQL, ensure you meet the following requirements:

[✓] Flutter (Channel stable, 3.19.2, on macOS 14.2.1 23C71 darwin-arm64, locale en-US) • Flutter version 3.19.2 on channel stable at /Users/rona/Sites/Tools/flutter • Upstream repository https://github.com/flutter/flutter.git • Framework revision 7482962148 (3 months ago), 2024-02-27 16:51:22 -0500 • Engine revision 04817c99c9 • Dart version 3.3.0 • DevTools version 2.31.1

The best option is probably Flutter right now: https://flutter.dev/

If you don't mind writing the UI native, sharing only business logic code, Kotlin is an option: https://kotlinlang.org/docs/multiplatform.html#kotlin-multip...

Kotlin also can do the UI if you use Compose: https://www.jetbrains.com/lp/compose-multiplatform/ ... however, iOS support is still in alpha, and Web is "experimental". If you're not willing to cope with that (expect to have to change your code as they develop the framework) then Flutter is the way as it's pretty stable already on all platforms.

If you already know Typescript and React, you may also consider React Native: https://reactnative.dev/

In the competitive world of mobile app development, having a strong portfolio of Flutter projects is essential to stand out. Flutter, Google's UI toolkit, is renowned for its ability to create beautiful, cross-platform apps efficiently. Let's explore ten projects that can demonstrate your expertise and make your CV shine.

Deploying Dart functions to AWS Lambda enables you to utilize them not only within AWS Lambda but also integrate them with services like Amazon API Gateway, allowing you to leverage them in Flutter applications as well. This unified codebase in Dart offers great convenience.

[3]: https://github.com/flutter/flutter/tree/master/packages/flut...

Thanks - that link does not appear to be open access, anyways I don't think I've seen it. I'm familiar with Flutter at a high-level (Kevin Moore gave a great talk on it at Wasm I/O), and I think other than requiring users to work in Dart, it is probably one of the most powerful ways to do cross-platform UI today.

Worth noting that their original GPU backend was Skia, and now they are retooling around Flutter GPU (Impeller)[0], which is kind of designed similarly as an abstract rendering interface over platform-specific GPU APIs.

[0]https://github.com/flutter/flutter/wiki/Flutter-GPU

If you are considering Electron/React then I would suggest adding Flutter to your list of technologies to consider. It uses Dart (a language similar to C#) and has a lot going for it… relatively quick to get up to speed with, fantastic developer experience (e.g., hot reload, great IDE support, good development tools) and very strong cross-platform support: it generates native iOS, Android, MacOS, Windows and Linux executables. Check it out: https://flutter.dev/

I am migrating XF app into MAUI and writing a simple Navigation framework because Prism doesn't work well and I didn't use anything advanced anyway. So, I am surfing the code of MAUI to intercept all the back buttons, etc. I haven't found a single mention of apis related to predictive back "RegisterOnBackInvokedCallback", "OnBackInvokedDispatcher", "OnBackPressedDispatcher", "AddCallback", "android:enableOnBackInvokedCallback" Also I don't see any issue on github that would say "Support Android Predictive back". Only one kinda related https://github.com/dotnet/maui/issues/8680

Below issue is still reproducing in Maui .net7.0 version also. #10163

Maui is Open Source, MIT License

https://github.com/dotnet/maui

.NET is Open Source

https://dotnet.microsoft.com/en-us/platform/open-source

I do share your skepticism of Microsoft, but it looks like the economics and cash flow dynamics have changed drastically after the advent of the cloud.

Microsoft is more focused on getting developers onto its ecosystem and help them with open source projects with the hope that they will use its Azure cloud services and bring in the money.

My skepticism is a bit relaxed now and I have no qualms using .NET.

I hope I am not wrong.

It's a bit of a hit and miss as of today. CLI, back-end and natively compiled libraries (think dll/so/dylib or even .lib/.a - you can statically link NAOT binaries into other "unmanaged" code) work best, GUI - requires more work.

Avalonia[0] and MAUI[1] have known working templates with it, but YMMV.

[0] https://github.com/lixinyang123/AvaloniaAOT / https://github.com/AvaloniaUI/Avalonia/ / honorable mention https://github.com/VincentH-Net/CSharpForMarkup

[1] https://github.com/dotnet/maui (try out with just true in csproj - it is known to work e.g. on iOS)

While this is the quite endorsed by the community: https://github.com/dotnet/maui/discussions/339

I think the fundamental issue is that desktop Linux is way too fragmented. Not only just GTK2/3 and Qt but you have GNOME, KDE, XFCE, Cinnamon and then you have X11, Xorg, Wayland...

To be honest, all those craps are why desktop Linux never took off. I'm very safe to say MAUI for Linux will eventually renders components off its own using framebuffer and hardware acceleration APIs such as OpenGL or Vulkan just because of the market fragmentations...

If desktop Linux truly wants to get the attention, it will need to unify. Fixing dependency hell using Flatpak is the right direction.

There is an existing old fork of MAUI for Linux that uses GTK: https://github.com/jsuarezruiz/maui-linux

First I came across this Github issue: https://github.com/dotnet/maui/issues/9687 - According to this issue, this is a known bug for MAUI iOS, but it works OK for MAUI Android. As I said, I target Android only and I have the exact same issue. It's apparantly fixed with some of the latest versions for MAUI but the problem still occurs to me even with MAUI version:

I saw this and tried to imitate (ofc my lack of experience wouldn't allow me to do it in the exact way). Already found some documentation that allowed to understand better. Thanks for the insigh.

I implemented the Auth controller following this sample code from Microsoft.