Thread by @twostraws

@biz84 Broadly I welcome folks trying to provide clarity when it comes to platforms. However, I don't think this was a particularly strong effort: it comes across as biased, incomplete, and a bit condescending. I don't think many iOS devs will read it and say "I should try Flutter."

@biz84 1. You don't mention at the start that you run a site specifically about Flutter, and are inherently in favor of one side.

2. You jump in immediately with "why Flutter is already a superior technology" – before you've actually shown anything.

@biz84 3. You say "Apple is a hardware company, and has no incentive in building and promoting a cross-platform framework," conveniently ignoring Apple's work in making Swift work on Linux.

@biz84 4. You then talk about how Auto Layout and Swift were bad initially, as if that has any impact on modern developers.

5. You say, "And the current workflow for making apps on iOS (and Android) is… meh" and provide no reasoning behind it.

@biz84 6. You say, "And unless heavy computations are needed, all code runs on a single isolate, resulting in fewer bugs" as if that's a good thing – you can run all your Swift code on a single thread too if you like.

@biz84 7. "Just look at communication between objects on iOS. We have closures, delegates, notifications, target-selectors, key-value observation" – these are patterns that are used across dozens of languages. If you're suggesting iOS having them is bad, you're on shaky ground.

@biz84 8. "UITableViewDelegate… contains 40 different methods as of iOS 12. Forty. Talk about single responsibility principle." Which of those 40 do you think should be removed? The ones you personally don't use? "Single responsibility principle" doesn't mean having a single method.

@biz84 9. "For me (and a lot of designers I talked to) design consistency across platforms is more important." Fine, but for me (and a lot of users I talked to) apps looking and working like native apps is more important than consistency with platforms they don't use.

@biz84 10. "I think a lot of companies were waiting for version 1.0. And I have no doubt that the jobs will come." Why do you say that? Saying "jobs will come" is a biased way of saying "there aren't (m)any jobs right now."

@biz84 11. "Compared to iOS or Android development, the learning curve is not so steep." Why do you say that? There are 100+ books teaching iOS and probably the same for Android. How many are about Flutter? There are thousands of video hours teaching iOS/Android – how many for Flutter?

@biz84 12. "Dart is an easy language to learn, and the tooling is great." Again, you provide nothing to back this up – you just saying “it’s easy” doesn’t mean anything.

@biz84 13. "If you learn Flutter now, you will have a competitive advantage over developers and teams that stick with existing native workflows." Why? We've been able to write cross-platform using React Native, Xamarin, and others but none of those have provided a competitive advantage.

@biz84 I get that you like Flutter a lot. I get that you like Dart too. But you're just taking pot shots at other platforms without considering what actually matters to people, and that's just not going to convince people.

@biz84 You can do better than this, I know you can. If you keep writing about the positive – and negative! – points of Flutter and Dart, without trying to draw odd comparisons with iOS, you’ll have a better chance of convincing people to try it.

@biz84 So, I'm glad you gave it a shot, but I hope you can understand quite a few parts of the article just don't sit well with me. I hope Flutter and Dart do well, but I think this kind of pitch is likely to put off people more than it attracts them.

@biz84 You might find it helpful to address concerns that iOS folks have about similar frameworks. For example:

1. Why should this cross-platform approach succeed when it hasn’t taken off on other frameworks, even when they were using common languages like JavaScript?

@biz84 2. Why should people trust Yet Another Google thing when Google has a history of killing products when it gets bored with them?

3. How well does it integrate with system libraries like ARKit and Core ML?

4. How performant is Flutter/Dart when compared with Swift and native UI?

@biz84 Sorry it took me 24 hours to reply; I was traveling yesterday and was really tired! I hope some of what I've said can help you write a more constructive article next time – having good, clear, and two-sided comparisons of platforms is important.