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Exported source code: https://github.com/FlutterFlow/ff-trivia/tree/flutterflow
Alex and I, along with a friend of ours from Google, quit our jobs in 2019 to work on a cross-platform mobile app that ultimately failed. It was a learning opportunity, and it also led us to feel the pain of the slow iteration process every time we wanted to roll out a new experience. We were able to experiment with various landing pages within hours, but building new screens and app experiences took weeks or even months. For over a year now, we’ve been tirelessly working on fixing this problem.
I first fell in love with coding by pure luck as a kid in Ethiopia. My father, who at the time owned an internet cafe, decided to start taking night classes in CS in the late 90s. Ultimately he didn’t use his degree professionally, but I ended up with learning materials and a compiler, Turbo C++ 3.0. As I grew older, eventually ending up as an engineer at Google, I started to appreciate that as engineers we were often tasked with solving problems even when the solution didn’t necessarily involve writing code. Alex comes from a physics background, doing his undergrad at Stanford, and transitioned to study CS and AI there as well. In 2016 he joined the team I was on, a small ML group within Google Maps. He’ll often admit he had underestimated the amount of skill involved in building beautiful, fast and functional apps. And he certainly didn’t expect to love building with Flutter as much as he does, having been entrenched in ML for most of his career. Yet here we are.
There has recently been a healthy amount of skepticism towards no-code tools, mainly due to concerns of extensibility and scalability. This is definitely the case for some apps - a good example is a tool such as FlutterFlow itself. It would be very difficult to build all of FlutterFlow recursively. We do use it internally for many of our pages, but using a visual builder to implement our code generator seems far fetched. This doesn’t imply however that there isn’t a middle ground that enables fast iteration in a visual builder, coupled with the ability to write code that seamlessly integrates with the overall experience. We’re not quite there yet, but we believe this is the right direction.
Finally, we believe Flutter is going to be the catalyst that drives this movement. It’s composability, the fact that it’s super cross-platform (Android/iOS/Web/Desktop/Embedded), and the vibrant and passionate community it fosters give it a unique advantage. Whether we do it or someone else, the application builder of the future will be built on Flutter. Huge thanks to our users, the Flutter team and the Flutter community.
We’d love for you to give it a try and share your thoughts. What do you think the future of application development is going to be?
p.s. we were on HN when we announced our launch back in May: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27238381
I've been trying to use this product for a personal app I'm making. its really good until its not. There needs to be better controls for mock data in listviews, I don't want to hook up to API in the tool, I have my own data, but I need the listview to aleast pretend theres data there.
Also the lack of positioned widgets in conjunction with stack views makes it hard to transfer the flutterflow experience to the actual app. What happens if I want anchor a view to the bottom of the screen in a stack? I cant without positioned widget. Imagine I have this view https://github.com/o1298098/Flutter-Movie/blob/master/srceen... and I want the bottom white part to be the "top" of the stack. This image isnt the best example because the poster is the entire background, imagine instead I had a column and I wanted to stack the bottom white card over it.
These kind of details make me have to abandon a almost perfect tool, but its utility is not quite 100% that is causes me to have to throw it all out.
I really wish I could use this tool with all the native widget, not just some.