Google's cross-platform Flutter UI toolkit goes 1.0
Cross-platform frameworks that don’t use native controls have suffered from problems...<p>- They inevitably don’t look or work like native apps in ways both big and small, frustrating and annoying users. (... the spell-checker doesn’t work right or text selection is janky or unavailable where it should be, certain short-cuts work differently or have different gestures or keys, etc.)<p>- they don’t get updates to native controls... e.g. if the OS adds some new drag-and-drop capability to text fields the framework doesn’t get it unless and until the framework is updated (and the app is updated to use the newer version of the framework). Of course, some things are never deemed important enough to be adopted by the framework.<p>- Ambitious frameworks that really try to minimize the gaps between apps build with the framework vs native app grow to be very large. They take on the role of the entire app-facing OS API, which is truely massive in today’s systems. This leads to slow-loading&#x2F;building, resource-hungry apps. Each app becomes a mini-OS unto itself.<p>- there are cross-platform issues, like fonts that fit on one host OS get cut off in another, or differences in volume control etc.<p>- dealing with the cross-platform issues the framework doesn’t solve becomes very difficult for the app developer. They’ve got to find a way in, through, or around the framework (in an area it already isn’t handling well).<p>- devs have yet another set of tech and tools they have to master. And I mean devs in the wide sense here, designers, coders, testers, etc. Some also have to become masters of how the framework and each host OS interact, in order to debug the inevitable problems.<p>- many potential third-party tools will have native support and bindings but most won’t make accommodations for your framework, so you end up having to support that yourself, or do without.<p>Building and maintaining an app twice is a very serious expense. But the expense of dealing with the issues with crosss-platform frameworks can be pretty big as well. Of course it depends on what you’re doing (shorter term and longer term) whether or not it makes sense. But go in with your eyes open. Consider other options (like examining your app architecture and see if you can’t find a way to factor some of your naturally cross-platform stuff into a shared library usable by the native apps of each platform you support).