I'm a Flutter developer starting to be a bit disappointed in the tech (and the community) and sceptical if it can really produce great apps, so I'm thinking about switching to something new in the coming years.
I decided to build a multiplatform app with SwiftUI to test out the waters. So far, learning SwiftUI and building an app is somehow both easier and harder than expected, but I'm glad to see something new.
I'm planning to write a series of apps in the next 6 months, so that I build confidence shipping apps with SwiftUI and maybe find a smaller contract with it.
It's certainly not terrible, and I'll probably stick with it a year until I learn something else as well as I know Flutter...
But to answer...
Main reason, I'd like to ship software that isn't only good, but great. To create great apps, it needs to integrate into the OS/browser, and my experience with Flutter has been not great in this regard. The apps always look and feel a bit foreign. I'd rather write 3 separate apps (web, ios, android) that feel great, than ship something faster (if even...) that is so bad, sometimes I feel it's a spit in the face of our customers.
The mobile alternatives became much better: when they started, they were (as I remember) significantly better than the alternatives. Since then, RN became much better, Swift and Kotlin became mainstream, SwiftUI, Jetpack Computer came out, and in a couple of years KMP will also offer a pretty compelling alternative.
Flutter is spread too thin: I understand why they did it, it's great for marketing, and I know people who use it on web, desktop and embedded and are happy... To me, however, it feels like they added platforms before making iOS and Android work and feel great. I hate that I had to debug and pin dependencies that broke due to web incompatibility on an a mobile only app. IMO, it's so shjt on web it's laughable.
I am a mobile developer using Xamarin/.NET MAUI for some years now. It is not as popular as Flutter but im pretty happy with it. In my company all of our apps are Xamarin/MAUI too and these are used by hundreds of people.
MAUI is not perfect, theres still a long way to go, but it is getting better.
We still using Xamarin because of that.
I decided to build a multiplatform app with SwiftUI to test out the waters. So far, learning SwiftUI and building an app is somehow both easier and harder than expected, but I'm glad to see something new.
I'm planning to write a series of apps in the next 6 months, so that I build confidence shipping apps with SwiftUI and maybe find a smaller contract with it.