Quoted:
Thanks for asking!
The decision is based on our past three years of Flutter development, a comparison of Flutter and alternative solutions for building the AppFlowy Web, and our business needs.
Flutter suits our needs well for building a cross-platform app with a relatively good native experience (check out our apps compared to similar Electron apps to feel the difference). Like any programming framework, it has some drawbacks. For instance, there are limited third-party packages available on pub.dev, iframe is not supported, and some Flutter issues have remained unresolved for more than two years. I don’t want to delve into too much detail and risk creating unnecessary negative sentiment, but I do believe Flutter is a solid choice for building native apps. Collaborative workspace tools are among the most complex frontend software, and based on our testing, Flutter Web is not yet capable of delivering a great editing experience. This doesn’t mean it’s unsuitable for less UX-heavy apps—we simply lack enough insight to assess its suitability for other types of web applications.
On the other hand, React is mature and meets our needs exceptionally well. We also have talented team members experienced in using React to build editors. Additionally, since the core part of AppFlowy is written in Rust, rewriting UIs is relatively straightforward for us.
For these reasons, we decided to use React to build our web app.
I’m not a Flutter developer myself, so this is more from a product and business perspective. If you have specific questions about Flutter, I can direct you to the flutter developers on our team.
Message:
Hello!
Thank you very much for your answers, Annie and Eric. These answers and insights are very useful and instructive. I appreciate the detailed answers.
Timestamp:
2025-01-25T15:59:45.479000+00:00
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