[HN Gopher] FlutterFlow: Low-code Flutter apps
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FlutterFlow: Low-code Flutter apps
Author : dested
Score : 138 points
Date : 2021-05-21 18:58 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (flutterflow.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (flutterflow.io)
| offtop5 wrote:
| I was very interested up until I saw the pricing. $70 a month is
| way too much.
|
| A big issue here is just how easy flutter is, I'd rather invest
| 20 hours once to build it using Dart, then to pay $800 a year.
| treis wrote:
| On the contrary, that is way too cheap. Equal to approximately
| 30 minutes a month of a decent iOS developers time. If the
| product works it should deliver 10-100 times that value.
| offtop5 wrote:
| I mean, they can always grandfather in us early adopters.
|
| It's for a hobby $70 is a bit hard to justify.
| abelsm wrote:
| FlutterFlow cofounder here. Thanks for your input on our
| pricing.
|
| It's more than knowing how to code, we've been building with
| Flutter for a while now, but there's still no way we could have
| coded FlutterMet in under an hour. It would take us 10 hrs+ to
| manually do that. But it took <1 hour in FlutterFlow.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TXsjnd_4SBo
|
| Also, we allow you to push the generated code to your Github
| repository, so you don't have to keep paying us once you build
| your app. :)
| Escapado wrote:
| To be honest this is the best selling point in my opinion.
|
| It's a great tool for MVP scenarios and especially in
| business contexts that price tag is entire negligible
| compared to the hourly rate of most engineers! So a single
| hour saved will already make up for it.
| offtop5 wrote:
| Anyway you can come down to maybe 30$.
|
| Anything over $50 becomes a line item in my budget, I can't
| justify spending $50 a month in the hobbyist space. It's a
| great idea, I just don't think I can really afford it.
| abelsm wrote:
| We have a $30/mo plan. :)
| notsureaboutpg wrote:
| To get a workable, usable prototype out the door and even
| save one day is well worth the monthly price you quoted
| tylerhou wrote:
| I don't think you're the target audience, then. A startup would
| be happy spending $70 a month (per developer) if it made their
| developers even 1% more productive:
|
| $100,000 / 12 * 0.01 == $83.33
|
| (This is a low estimate; the value an engineer delivers to an
| organization is generally much larger than their compensation.)
|
| It's possible that you believe they should introduce a cheaper
| tier (hobbyist, open source) with a reduced feature set, but
| IMO $70 is probably undercharging for most tech corporations.
| sz4kerto wrote:
| I've tried it out, registered for the premium to check out the
| details.
|
| Biggest problem: querying Firebase is problematic. I can bind a
| collection to a ListView, but in many cases I'd like to map a
| field to something. For example I have a list of "purchases" and
| I'd like to map the "buyerId" to an email address. This can't be
| done, and the generated code is hard to adapt to this kind of use
| case.
|
| And therein lies the complexity to be honest.
|
| I think it'd worth $30 just as a designer. But you have to be
| able to code.
| abelsm wrote:
| Thanks so much for sharing feedback!
|
| In this scenario, your collection is "purchases" and there's a
| "buyerId" field in a purchase document? And you want to get the
| email from buyerId?
|
| If buyerId is a uid, you can do another query to get the user
| document from uid and get the email address from that. I may be
| misunderstanding the question.
| tpmx wrote:
| I wish you success. I really like Dart and the concept of
| Flutter.
|
| However: I'm still waiting for a 100% Flutter-based iOS app
| published in the app store that I can try to make sure that it
| does not have any apparent jank.
|
| Yes, I know that Flutter 2.2 which launched a few days ago
| included tools designed to fight some of the sources of jank
| (e.g. bundling precompiled shaders) but after such a long time of
| promises from the Flutter team I just want to see a 100% flutter
| app hitting a solid 60 fps on my own phone, for real.
| judge2020 wrote:
| I think google pay[0] is entirely flutter[1] (how much is
| actually flutter is unknown). It does seem pretty slow,
| actually - it's like it only plays every third frame when
| animating switching between the app's tabs.
|
| 0: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/google-pay-save-pay-
| manage/id1...
|
| 1: https://developers.googleblog.com/2020/09/google-pay-
| picks-f...
| tpmx wrote:
| Here's a subthread about Flutter jank/performance from the
| 2.0 release back in March:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26333213
|
| Back then at least one of the "featured" apps had key screens
| written in e.g. ObjC. Google Pay was also discussed.
| novok wrote:
| My current idea of how to do a non-javascript multi-platform
| app strategy:
|
| Apple SwiftUI for iOS & macOS.
|
| Flutter for Android, Windows, Linux and possibly a web client.
| tpmx wrote:
| You had me at "non-javascript". Anyway, that seems like a
| smart and pragmatic strategy. Thanks for sharing that idea.
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| I am still looking for the equivalent of Visual Basic for making
| modern Web and mobile apps.
|
| It is exciting that we might finally be getting there!
| jordanab wrote:
| ASP.NET Web Forms + Telerik components always came really close
| for me for web apps. And to lesser extend Xamarin Forms for
| mobile as well.
| pjmlp wrote:
| VB is 30 years old this year and we still need to re-invent for
| the Web, sadly.
|
| However there is stuff like OutSystems or Oracle Apex.
|
| By the way Xojo does support WebAssembly.
| axaxs wrote:
| Same here. VB was widely dogged, perhaps rightly so. But I've
| never been near as fast or productive when making a functional
| GUI. It's sad that fell out of favor.
| pavlov wrote:
| There's React Studio which is free and quite complete, although
| has some learning curve:
|
| https://reactstudio.com
| machello13 wrote:
| The low-codeness is certainly impressive. Judging from the sample
| app though, Flutter still has a long way to go in terms of native
| look-and-feel (on iOS at least).
| gman83 wrote:
| Isn't it using Material Design?
| machello13 wrote:
| Native iOS apps that use material design don't feel sluggish
| or laggy.
| ladyanita22 wrote:
| The app looks good on an iPhone.
| machello13 wrote:
| It looks fine, depending on your taste anyway, but there's
| noticeable scrolling lag and animations are stuttery the
| first time they play. Feels sluggish in general.
| sgt wrote:
| I would consider Flutter apps that have been compiled to
| ARM and runs on an iPhone natively (basically just using a
| canvas to draw pixels on) is very fast. However Flutter web
| is not very fast, but it's getting there.
| jamil7 wrote:
| There are currently some performance issues on iOS, this
| being the most well known
| https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/76180
| sgt wrote:
| Judging from the comment by Hixie on Feb 20 it seems like
| it is not trivial to fix. For now I would just avoid
| animations. If you're building end user applications that
| have high aesthetic requirements then you should be
| coding using iOS and Swift. I say that as a Flutter
| developer.
| fredgrott wrote:
| Considering one has to hand write an ios approach and a material
| design one unless they support the Flutter Platform widgets
| plugins most of your would probably need to avoid this.
|
| My bias, I am not the project lead on flutter Platform widgets
| but I am one of the lower end contributors.
| primitivesuave wrote:
| I'm genuinely curious how easy no-code app development has to
| become in order to be adopted at scale in the software industry.
| Right now I'm still getting the sense that most companies prefer
| to hire a dedicated app development team and have full control
| over the architecture.
| poisonborz wrote:
| Depends on your use case. I'd say everything that is easily
| adaptable to a certain amount of common settings, is already
| there: run of the mill webshops, static websites/blogs/cms-es,
| forms, "info card" apps. And even with these, run if you want
| to think outside the box. More complex scenarios require so
| many knobs and switches that anyone working on them has to
| become a quasi-developer of a much worse and restrictive
| "language", akin to SAP or Liferay. So other than that above,
| put all the "no-code" tech besides "disruptive ai big data
| blockchain augmented reality platform".
| kiawe_fire wrote:
| IMO, the answer lies somewhere in between.
|
| The biggest benefit I see from the low code movement is, what
| I hope, will be a trend in bespoke apps where devs like
| myself spend less time building a single user experience and
| more time architecting a cohesive system with bespoke "low
| code" tools on top, that can help enable non-engineer power
| users to then work within that business-specific framework to
| craft the screens and user experiences that the masses then
| use.
|
| Essentially a way to keep the devs doing more actual
| engineering and architecture work while the more accessible
| things like "move this button" or "create a screen that shows
| this data we already have" can be made more accessible to
| more people.
|
| That said, I think general purpose low code solutions meant
| for all businesses and industries will be more for the MVP /
| rapid prototyping stages for the most part.
|
| But I could well be proven wrong!
| swiley wrote:
| Most "apps" are really replacements for simple web pages
| because of the way Apple is distorting computing.
| antris wrote:
| I don't know where this Apple dig is coming from. Most
| applications are just putting a bunch of strings into
| database and displaying strings from a database. This has
| always been the case with or without Apple, and it works the
| same way regardless of platform.
| pjmlp wrote:
| That has been the case for most applications since green
| phosphor displays, just plain CRUD forms.
|
| Works perfectly well for 90% of most businesses.
| wpietri wrote:
| I think the point is more to take a set of common problems
| _out_ of the software industry. The classic example for me here
| is the spreadsheet. For many of its uses, it 's definitely not
| as good as bespoke software, but also way better than paying
| for a dedicated app development team.
| sgt wrote:
| Yes, you generally always run into something that the company
| building your low code tools will need to cater for or fix for
| you somehow. It gives you so much grief that you might as well
| write and own your tools.
| swyx wrote:
| its not a binary.. first of all there are tons of people who
| have software needs who just dont have that option. Whats the
| solution, hire you? you're expensive, and you have your own
| backlog to deal with.
|
| second of all flutterflow (and other code-exporting builders
| like webflow) generates code you can take over, so it can
| even be helpful to people who _could_ code it themselves, all
| it has to do is save some substantial time, which as a UI
| builder myself a WYSIWYG tool always does.
| petra wrote:
| No-code is is limited.
|
| I've read about an hospital management system implemented by
| low-code. So if it can be useful to that complexity levels,
| maybe the problem isn't technical, but more about marketing,
| control over the platform, or just general resistance by
| software developers.
|
| So i wonder, how long do those shifts towards a much higher
| productivity platform take in the software industry ?
| mkw5053 wrote:
| Is it possible to write completely custom components?
| abelsm wrote:
| We don't support editing code in FlutterFlow atm. But this is
| something we want to enable.
|
| What we see a lot of our users do now is push to Github
| (flutterflow branch), and merge in to their main branch where
| they have their custom logic.
| sgt wrote:
| I checked it out - but I think most developers would be more
| comfortable writing Dart code to develop Flutter code. I can see
| that something like FlutterFlow is useful if you need snippets to
| e.g. get a stylized layout with little effort.
|
| Kind of like a quick way of getting the look you want, and then
| pasting it back into Android Studio. Even then I'd change and
| improve the code - I see that the styles are a bit "hard coded"
| with a variety of fonts I have never seen the need to use.
|
| The UI is a bit laggy on Safari.
| GeneralTspoon wrote:
| Of course the UI is laggy - the web app is built with Flutter!
| -\\_(tsu)_/-
| kiawe_fire wrote:
| Initially this looks really nice - very much the kind of tooling
| I've thought about for Flutter since I started using it.
|
| This product aside, though, I find it funny how the whole
| "reactive widget tree that gets rebuilt when data changes" and
| "everything is just nested objects with properties, no XML
| needed" trend felt like "backlash" against the UI Builders,
| Visual Basics, and Glades.
|
| And yet now we're building visual tools to control all the nested
| reactive component frameworks very much in that same vein.
| InfiniteRand wrote:
| I think neither paradigm is invalid and neither is a clear
| winner so fashion drifts back and forth
| iddan wrote:
| I think UI builders are considered as good tools, it's the XML
| that is "not needed"
| jrm4 wrote:
| At the risk of being a grump, is this yet another thing that
| could probably be as good as HyperCard, but won't because
| monetizing these sort of heavily creative things tends not to
| work?
| canadianfella wrote:
| What part is the grumpy part?
| asgreaves wrote:
| FlutterFlow cofounder here! We thought the HN crowd would want to
| see the generated code for FlutterMet, so here it is:
| https://github.com/FlutterFlow/FlutterMetSample/tree/flutter...
|
| We try to generate clean Flutter code that follows best practices
| - we have a long way to go, but we couldn't be more excited.
|
| Edit: Also, here's the video of us building it (in just under an
| hour): https://youtu.be/TXsjnd_4SBo
| swyx wrote:
| congrats on launch! just wondering since you're here - what is
| the roadmap now that you're launched and what key hires are you
| looking to make?
|
| am always interested in how companies transition from a deep
| build phase into a build-and-market-what-you've-already-built
| phase.
| salimmadjd wrote:
| It'll be great if you had an "about us" section there so I
| could easily see who is behind it, instead having to google it.
|
| Your backgrounds [1] seem very solid so why not showcase it?
|
| [1] https://www.linkedin.com/in/asgreaves
| 01walid wrote:
| Can it talk to a GraphQL backend ?
| anatolinicolae wrote:
| You can make it to. https://pub.dev/packages/graphql
| abelsm wrote:
| It's on our list.
| [deleted]
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(page generated 2021-05-21 23:00 UTC)