Announcing Flutter Release Preview 1
This release follows Airbnb posts describing their deep experience in React Native and why they ended up abandoning it:
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;airbnb-engineering&#x2F;sunsetting-react-native-1868ba28e30a" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;airbnb-engineering&#x2F;sunsetting-react-nativ...</a><p>Based on the issues they&#x27;ve had with React Native [1] I believe they would&#x27;ve had a better experience with Dart and Flutter which also has a fast iterative dev experience with a productive language that lets you build both iOS and Android Apps from a single code-base. But in contrast to RN, Dart 2 is statically typed and AOT compiled into native ARM which enables better performance and doesn&#x27;t have any of the JS VM issues Airbnb kept running into. I also prefer Flutter&#x27;s x-plat approach of drawing all their widgets with Skia as it also mitigates the UI widget inconsistencies they would&#x27;ve had if they tried to wrap native widgets. Flutter widgets follow Material design by default but can also be themed to look like native iOS widgets (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;flutter.io&#x2F;widgets&#x2F;cupertino&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;flutter.io&#x2F;widgets&#x2F;cupertino&#x2F;</a>).<p>React Native nails the development experience but is plagued with issues which isn&#x27;t clear if it&#x27;s because it&#x27;s architecturally flawed or that it&#x27;s just poorly resourced and Facebook only cares about resolving their own issues.<p>I&#x27;ve been burnt by the lack of support in React Native indiscriminately closing issues, which stopped me from wasting my time reporting any more issues and eventually stopped using React Native altogether.<p>I&#x27;ve been pleasantly surprised by Flutter, it does what it says on the tin, enables a productive dev environment for creating Native Apps from a single code-base and in contrast to my RN experience their support has been stellar, several team members responded to my queries immediately with solutions and workarounds.<p>The biggest issue I&#x27;ve run into coming from JS&#x2F;RN is not being able to use reflection due to iOS&#x27;s AOT restrictions for which you&#x27;ll need to use code-gen to workaround. Also I prefer JSX  for designing UIs, whilst Dart&#x27;s object declarations enable a kind of code DSL it&#x27;s not as composable as using a declarative XML markup where you can freely move widgets around to design UIs. Ultimately I hope they provide a similar language feature for using an XML-like markup as an alternative for (and just transpiles to) object declarations.<p><pre><code>  [1] https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;airbnb-engineering&#x2F;react-native-at-airbnb-the-technology-dafd0b43838#4b2b</code></pre>