sidekick VS flutter-demo

Seems interesting might try on sidekick https://github.com/fluttertools/sidekick

I've been using https://github.com/fluttertools/sidekick this works well on windows

And as I'm in the mood of mentioning relevant stuff, Flutter Sidekick may make things easier/more manageable for you on Windows (as well as on Linux & Mac) as I guess using Android Studio's Windows version is probably still the best way to do Flutter development on a Windows host system for now (regardless of the availability of WSL2 and other VMs that you might run other OSes in).

There's a sample Flutter Desktop app repository here.

I keep hearing good things about Flutter, it's seems like a bit of a quiet hit. We've added support for Flutter Desktop in the next release of Hydraulic Conveyor so it'll get a lot easier to distribute Flutter apps outside the browser soon. There's a demo of how to package Flutter apps built using Github Actions here:

https://github.com/hydraulic-software/flutter-demo/

(see the conveyor.conf file, it's a normal Flutter Desktop app other than that). That won't work with the current release but we should get the next one out this week or next.

This should be great for people who want to bring their cross-platform mobile app to laptops and other form factors without exploding costs by needing to write/maintain an HTML version too. That duplication really isn't ideal for a lot of reasons e.g. some users will end up trying to use the web version from mobile so you end up with actually 4x frontend dev costs (iOS, Android, web desktop, web mobile) and for smaller projects it's just hard to justify.

Traditionally desktop deployment was a huge pain and that pushes people towards trying to use Chrome for everything, because it handles updates and uploading a few files to a web server is easy. With Conveyor and easily available multi-platform CI for compiles that's fixed now, the hardest part is buying the signing certificates which is just a bit of paperwork and money. The problem with trying to do everything with WebAssembly and canvas is that you're paying a big perf hit and due to cache partitioning you can't really reduce the size hit of an alternative language and graphics stack by amortizing it across different sites like was once possible. And browsers aren't interested in making it easy for people to do that, they want to control the whole experience, so there's lots of paper cuts and apps written with Flutter are ultimately going to be best experienced outside the browser.

[1] https://hydraulic.software/