The responsible Google manager thinks that only with a native look and feel that apps can feel great on Apple platforms. The Google Apps team agrees with me, because on iOS, they are moving from Material-UI to native iOS UI elements. A native look and feel is important because it looks nicer, and it's easier to use, because it works like all the other apps on your phone. I'm sure she could tap on those big cards on the right-hand side. I'm not sure my mom would recognize them. The web application also has these little twisties. The NavMe on mobile is easy to reach, obvious, and it's just one tap for the most used functionality. It's hard to reach and it's not obvious, and it's always two tabs, one for the menu, and then one for functionality. Why is the native app better here? First of all, on the web version, you need to tap the Hamburger Menu. I had recently started to move from their web version on the left to a native app here on iOS. ![]() It's a German online banking app that I use. Let me give you an example of why I think native look and feel has advantages. The apps are often slower and less comfortable in the browser, and they're missing that premium feel of the native look and feel. We can't store as much data and don't have access to all hardware functionality. We're also somewhat restricted compared to native applications. We've got no push notifications, and background sync doesn't work. First of all, compared to native applications, we've got some missing functionality, mostly on iOS. Case closed? No, unfortunately not because we've got issues on mobile. How does it look like? We use HTML and CSS for the UI, and JavaScript and TypeScript. There are a couple of different frameworks out there, React, Angular, Vue are the most popular ones. You've got HTML and CSS, and JavaScript and TypeScript, and Node.js, and npm, and Webpack and stuff. Why? Because it's the biggest software ecosystem we ever had, and it's got the most developers. That's our default stack for cross-platform. Now that we know why, how can we build them? The answer should be web. That's why we need cross-platform frontends because they are cheaper. Good enough means good enough for enterprise and consumer apps. We need cross-platform frontends because they're cheaper, and they're good enough. What we want to do instead is have one framework and one language, and we call that cross-platform. We could try to build with the native SDKs, but that's too expensive. These days, we need Mac and Linux, and of course, iOS and Android on mobile. Thirty years ago when I started, I just needed to build a Windows application. Why do we need cross-platform frontends? The reason is because our users are multi-platform. I'd like to think that I give you options, but in the end, you decide. I don't try to sell you books, training courses. Even though I use Java, Angular, and Flutter, I'm not associated with these projects. I've also been a Java developer for 23 years. I help organize the QCon London and QCon Plus tracks on Java and frontend. Who made me the expert here? I did in a sense, because I built a Flutter app that's in the app stores. I'll tell you why.įirst, why and how can you build cross-platform frontends? How does Flutter work? I'll tell you about my Flutter experiences, and then give you some advice on when to use which framework. We shouldn't, because I can only recommend Flutter on mobile. I want to answer one question in my talk, which is, can we build mobile, web, and desktop frontends with Flutter and one codebase? The answer is yes, we can.
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