back to article Time for a little bet on Google? App-building framework Flutter now fitted for more than phones – desktops, too

Google's cross-platform mobile Flutter SDK reached its 1.0 milestone on Tuesday, an event marked at the Flutter Live conference in London. The open source framework allows developers to write mobile applications in Dart, a programming language not widely used outside of Google, and run them on both Android and iOS devices. …

  1. _LC_
    Thumb Down

    Thanks, but no thanks!

    Android and IOS doesn't cut it. What about the rest?

    And Dart? How many freaking languages are these guys going to pull out of their noses? Just no.

    1. fuzzie

      Re: Thanks, but no thanks!

      And people always seem to forget Qt :(

      It's been doing cross-many-plaforms (desktop/mobile/embedded) for ages. It's featured hardware accelerated rendering even in the Symbian days, have native-ish look'n'feel and loads of language bindings. The native-look frameworks generate big update frenzies when a platform does a make-over and often don't honour customizations/themes/shortcuts. That's the price of portability, sadly.

      If Google really wanted to add more cats to the pigeon coop they should just standardise of WebAssembly as executable format to unify(ish) the mobile and web deployment targets.

      PS: We definitely appear to be in an era with a glut of new programming languages :(

      1. Adrian 4
        Happy

        Re: Thanks, but no thanks!

        It's a funny thing about applications. They come in waves.

        I remember editors being the thing (there was surely some other craze before that) with everyone following Stallman in creating their own editor.

        Then compilers. Then operating systems (oddly, Stallman led these two as well, though he again didn't retain the mass market), Currently it's languages.

        What next ?

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Thanks, but no thanks!

        PS: We definitely appear to be in an era with a glut of new programming languages :(

        I can't see this sticking around for long. It'll go the way of MS Silverlight - but Google being Google, they'll persist for a while, then dump Flutter (and its few faithful users) because it hasn't got the mainstream success of Google Search or Android.

        Looking at all the stuff Google have shut down, it would be a brave developer really willing to nail their colours to the mast of this one.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Thanks, but no thanks!

          So, can we take it as a given that every app written in this framework will slurp every keystroke you make, every website you visit, your location (if possible) and expedite it back to the Google data silo along with a tracking identifier, whether you like it or not? Google doesn't give out free lunches.

  2. Flakk

    Write Once, Run Everywhere

    Where have I heard this one before? How long did it take Sun to improve Java beyond its humble "Write Once, Debug Everywhere" beginning? How long will it take Google?

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