Killed by Google VS Flutter

With Google’s graveyard[1] growing so fast, I’m careful with new Google announcements. An API like this sounds particularly problematic to replace sometime in future.

[1]: https://killedbygoogle.com/

Number 293 of killed things by Google: https://killedbygoogle.com/

> Google is large enough to not care about small opportunities. It ends up focusing on bigger opportunities

that result in shittier products overall. For example, just a few months ago they cut 17 features from Google Assistant because they couldn't monetize them, sorry, because these were "small opportunities": https://techcrunch.com/2024/01/11/google-is-removing-17-unde...

> all are excellent examples of Google's long term commitment to the product and constantly making things better and keeping them relevant for the market.

And here's a long list of excellent examples of Google killing products right and left because small opportunities or something: https://killedbygoogle.com/

And don't get me started on the whole Hangouts/Meet/Alo/Duo/whatever fiasco

> Sure it has shut down many small products but that is because they were unlikely to turn into bigger opportunities.

Translation: because they couldn't find ways to monetize the last cent out of them

>Google operates in China albeit via their HK domain.

The Chinese government has access to the iCloud account of every Chinese Apple user.

>They also had project DragonFly if you remember.

Which never materialized.

>The lesser of two evils is that one company doesn’t try to actively profile me (in order for their ads business to be better) with every piece of data it can find and forces me to share all possible data with them.

Apple does targeted and non targeted advertising as well. Additionally, your carrier has likely sold all of the data they have on you. Apple was also sued for selling user data to ad networks. Odd for a Privacy First company to engage in things like that.

>Google is famously known to kill apps that are good and used by customers: https://killedbygoogle.com/

Google has been around for 26 years I believe. According to that link 60 apps were killed in that timeframe. According to your statement that Google kills an app a month that would leave you 252 apps short. Furthermore, the numbers would indicate that Google has killed 2.3 apps per year or .192 apps per month.

>As for the subpar apps: there is a massive difference between the network traffic when on the Home Screen between iOS and Android.

Not sure how that has anything to do with app quality, but if network traffic is your concern there's probably a lot more an Android user can do than an iOS user tp control or eliminate the traffic.

> This is proved by countless “killed by Google” incidents..

Oh, the Google's Graveyard: https://killedbygoogle.com/

I was already starting to feel a little cornered in the whole Google ecosystem and a bit limited with stuff like backups, vendor lock in, etc. (and you always have the obvious hanging over your head) and ultimately, I think I just find the mental model of a SQL database more intuitive compared to a NoSQL database. So I thought to myself; "the longer I leave it, the harder it'll be to make the switch".

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/