New post on /r/flutterdev subreddit:
Providing Advice to Businesses Considering Flutter in Production?
I receive sponsorship from a multi-billion dollar global hardware maker to help a developer community with small, medium, and large companies in it. I don't distinguish between small-company and large-company, I just answer technical questions about a hardware-specific API. I've been using Flutter on the desktop, web, ios, and Android for the best year. I've also built hundreds of tests with Dart. I like Dart and I receive zero influence from my sponsor to use another technology. They are fine just sponsoring the "community," which is primarily a forum.As I'm so enthusiastic about Flutter, I started to influence businesses to use Flutter. I felt that I needed to put out a statement to the community of developers about a few words of caution. As I really like Flutter and emotionally wish that more people would use it, I am wondering how other people approach this type of "strategic consulting" advice. Imagine that you're giving advice to a large company about technology choice or an entrepreneur with limited resources (and the need to hire and manage a small dev team). I put down some cautions in the video below. I am wondering how other people respond to requests for advice.
https://youtu.be/GMkqFMbdMz0Here are the main points on my mind so you don't have to slog through the video:Flutter Web doesn't have all the packages yet and it is not so good for text-heavy web sitesFlutter Desktop doesn't have all the packages supported and the "release to store" and "signing" mechanism is either clunky or not feasible on Windows. I don't release to the Windows Store, so I can't comment on this, but people ask me about this. If someone knows about the security "signing" mechanism, please advise.null-safe, while awesome in the future, is not that easy to implement as of March 2021 if you use other packages. This may change real soon now, but maybe they should wait until the null-safe transition settles down?The really big issue on my mind is "can the business hire enough skilled Flutter developers?" Often, people will post on our forum about "want to hire Flutter developers WITH access to the hardware." Unfortunately, the hardware is about $1,000 per unit and it is difficult to ship around to some countries. :-( I know from answering questions and reading code snippets in our community and their direct discussions with other developers that a lot of people are still using Java and Objective C because they've been working on their business app for a while and making incremental improvements to it.Honestly, I don't want to get someone I give advice to into a tough situation at their company. What advice do you think I should give them with regards to Flutter? Should they go for it today, in production, in March 2021 for a business-critical app? Some of these entrepreneurs are betting the company. It's scary. They're likely looking at Flutter because I've run hundreds of tests with Dart/Flutter on four different hardware models (I have access to all the hardware models) over the course of years and I publish my tests and send it to them.
March 19, 2021 at 06:47PM by cloudster314
https://ift.tt/3s2NFgt