Move to Flutter from Ionic, augmented app

[Tord Nilsen]

Hi.

I'm planning an app with some augmented reality functions, phone sensor reading, GMaps and some more.

I've developed similar apps before in Ionic and know they have the plugin's I need.

But... new platforms is also cool. 

Should I move to Flutter? Or is it to early? Will I get in trouble with missing widgets/plugins/functionality?

Can I develop iOS app on a windows PC the same way as I can in Ionic? (Cloudbuild)

Thanks

[Brian Duffy]

Well its still beta so it has its ups and downs. On the positive side I found it surprisingly easy to apply a gaussian blur to an image and lay some text over it. On the negative side I had a problem getting the video_player plugin to work with the iphone simulator (though it works with the android emulator). I think now is a good time to be getting up to speed on this thing. I'm finding more and more participation in the community and from the developers. I got in on MS UWP in a similar time frame and watched it come to fruition only to see low adoption in the end. These things are always risky. I would say if you are playing with your own project and its not critical then keep playing with Flutter, on the other hand if you are working on something for a client you might want to stick with a more proven environment. 

[Francesco Jo]

I'm on Flutter since January 2018 and based on my personal experience, if you're personally interested in Flutter, I suggest you to stick on it.

IMO Flutter's IntelliJ integration is really cool to play compare to RN. Dart is not that cool for me compare to Kotlin/Swift but it is a neat, modern programming language as well so coding experience is much better than (Java|Type)scripts.

However, Flutter is still beta and although it perfectly mimicks native UI but sometimes it definitely looks unnatural sometimes while using it. I would describe the experience as "Faster and Lighter version, for mobile, Swing(of Java)". 

Other big pain-in-my-arse with Flutter is there's no "Flutter Native" WebView or MapView. At least there's a workaround about MapView, but there's no answer for WebView May-2018 current so remind it.

And one more, even though the Material design is not "Android only" thing and could be accepted by Apple but my inhouse iOS customers gave me a huge criticism about the design. Of course we can code to distinguish current running platform but it's tedious. What's more, Cupertino Widgets are few compare to Material Widgets in the moment.

One important thing we consider is Flutter is BETA so it must be improved but using it on your production is definitely risky. Unless you're running a small group with less resources but you must publish on both platforms, stick to your best tools.

For experiment or testing your business hypothesis(definitely everything is not too complex in this level), I think Flutter is a great tool to play with.