Instead, Flutter just gives you a canvas and the Flutter engine will draw anything you’d like on there. So why is Flutter so different from these other tools, why is it giving us the confidence as a native-first company? Flutter does not use web pages, or bridge to native components. The developer experience also wasn’t great: debugging was quite hard and I don’t even need to say much about Javascript vs. When we did React Native back in 2019, there were quite a few performance issues, even with simple things like showing and scrolling a list in some cases. Before Flutter we did a production app using React Native, and even though it looked promising, it had some quirks that made us ditch it in the end. Definitely a good step forward, and worth a try. This is where cross-platform tools like Xamarin Forms and React Native come in. Then, we came into the world of bridging to native components. These solutions have always been an easy pass for Pinch, simply because we would never get that quality app we always promise to deliver. We started out with web variants like Ionic and Cordova: nice and easy, especially when you have a background in web development, but far from the native look and feel. So we found a client that was willing to take this adventure with us and we got our first production app live back in 2019! More clients followed, and now Flutter is a dedicated team within Pinch, next to the native Android and iOS development teams we always had □Ĭross-platform solutions are not new within the mobile development world. They couldn’t ignore the progress we made in just two days though, and the look and feel was so good it was hard for them to see this wasn’t a native app. ![]() Pinch has always been a native company by heart, and even though we keep trying new ideas and give things like React Native a chance, they always end up showing that nothing is even close to native mobile apps. In the end, our demo triggered the management, and that got the whole Flutter ball rolling. ![]() After 4 years I can easily say we could’ve done way better, but back then we were surprising ourselves of how easy it was to pick up Flutter, how fast we saw results, how the look and feel would fool you to think it was native instead of a cross-platform tool, and how the developer experience was so nice! Coming from Kotlin we were quite spoiled, but even though Dart felt like a step back compared to Kotlin it was easy and nice to work with! There were similarities, and a massive potential. I managed to team up with one of my fellow Android colleague, John van der Vaart and for 2 days we tried to rewrite an existing app in Flutter, with zero knowledge, zero experience. It was still Alpha back then, so we kept our eyes on it and tried it out again when it was (close to) stable. Our Android lead fiddled around with Flutter during a hackathon, showed his findings, and was impressed, but not convinced yet. It was after a year or 2 at Pinch that I saw a first glimpse of Google’s UI toolkit: Flutter. The cross-platform tools always had some quirks. I did try out Xamarin at one point, and within Pinch, we even did React Native for one of our clients, but both solutions missed that native touch, the look and feel, the developer experience. I started out as an Android developer, fiddled around with the likes of iOS and Windows Phone in the early days, but stuck with Google for the long run. ![]() When I first started doing mobile development back in 2014, I could never have guessed ending up as a tech lead of a cross-platform solution. Curious to read more, check out the blog! Thomas also discusses the evolution of Flutter projects at Pinch and how the team started using BlocProvider, a bloc architecture combined with rxdart, to provide streams of data for input and output. The Flutter engine, therefore, optimises performance for smooth animations and responsiveness, making it possible to run on various devices. Thomas highlights in this blog how Flutter, unlike other cross-platform tools, does not use web pages or bridge to native components but instead provides a canvas to draw anything you want on it. Four years ago, Pinch made the decision to adopt Flutter as a dedicated team alongside their existing native Android and iOS development teams.
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