4 hours ago by asgreaves
FlutterFlow cofounder here! We thought the HN crowd would want to see the generated code for FlutterMet, so here it is: https://github.com/FlutterFlow/FlutterMetSample/tree/flutter...
We try to generate clean Flutter code that follows best practices â we have a long way to go, but we couldn't be more excited.
Edit: Also, here's the video of us building it (in just under an hour): https://youtu.be/TXsjnd_4SBo
31 minutes ago by treyhuffine
Love the product, this is incredible!
- Is it possible to set an API request header to include the Firebase ID token?
- Are you able to embed a webview on a page?
- Is there a pattern yet for in-app payments?
2 hours ago by swyx
congrats on launch! just wondering since you're here - what is the roadmap now that you're launched and what key hires are you looking to make?
am always interested in how companies transition from a deep build phase into a build-and-market-what-you've-already-built phase.
2 hours ago by salimmadjd
Itâll be great if you had an âabout usâ section there so I could easily see who is behind it, instead having to google it.
Your backgrounds [1] seem very solid so why not showcase it?
3 hours ago by tpmx
I wish you success. I really like Dart and the concept of Flutter.
However: I'm still waiting for a 100% Flutter-based iOS app published in the app store that I can try to make sure that it does not have any apparent jank.
Yes, I know that Flutter 2.2 which launched a few days ago included tools designed to fight some of the sources of jank (e.g. bundling precompiled shaders) but after such a long time of promises from the Flutter team I just want to see a 100% flutter app hitting a solid 60 fps on my own phone, for real.
2 hours ago by judge2020
I think google pay[0] is entirely flutter[1] (how much is actually flutter is unknown). It does seem pretty slow, actually - itâs like it only plays every third frame when animating switching between the appâs tabs.
0: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/google-pay-save-pay-manage/id1...
1: https://developers.googleblog.com/2020/09/google-pay-picks-f...
2 hours ago by tpmx
Here's a subthread about Flutter jank/performance from the 2.0 release back in March:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26333213
Back then at least one of the "featured" apps had key screens written in e.g. ObjC. Google Pay was also discussed.
2 hours ago by novok
My current idea of how to do a non-javascript multi-platform app strategy:
Apple SwiftUI for iOS & macOS.
Flutter for Android, Windows, Linux and possibly a web client.
2 hours ago by tpmx
That seems like a smart and pragmatic strategy. Thanks for sharing that idea!
3 hours ago by kiawe_fire
Initially this looks really nice - very much the kind of tooling Iâve thought about for Flutter since I started using it.
This product aside, though, I find it funny how the whole âreactive widget tree that gets rebuilt when data changesâ and âeverything is just nested objects with properties, no XML neededâ trend felt like âbacklashâ against the UI Builders, Visual Basics, and Glades.
And yet now weâre building visual tools to control all the nested reactive component frameworks very much in that same vein.
3 hours ago by InfiniteRand
I think neither paradigm is invalid and neither is a clear winner so fashion drifts back and forth
2 hours ago by iddan
I think UI builders are considered as good tools, itâs the XML that is ânot neededâ
5 hours ago by sgt
I checked it out - but I think most developers would be more comfortable writing Dart code to develop Flutter code. I can see that something like FlutterFlow is useful if you need snippets to e.g. get a stylized layout with little effort.
Kind of like a quick way of getting the look you want, and then pasting it back into Android Studio. Even then I'd change and improve the code - I see that the styles are a bit "hard coded" with a variety of fonts I have never seen the need to use.
The UI is a bit laggy on Safari.
4 hours ago by GeneralTspoon
Of course the UI is laggy - the web app is built with Flutter! ÂŻ\_(ă)_/ÂŻ
4 hours ago by jrm4
At the risk of being a grump, is this yet another thing that could probably be as good as HyperCard, but won't because monetizing these sort of heavily creative things tends not to work?
2 hours ago by canadianfella
What part is the grumpy part?
4 hours ago by sz4kerto
I've tried it out, registered for the premium to check out the details.
Biggest problem: querying Firebase is problematic. I can bind a collection to a ListView, but in many cases I'd like to map a field to something. For example I have a list of "purchases" and I'd like to map the "buyerId" to an email address. This can't be done, and the generated code is hard to adapt to this kind of use case.
And therein lies the complexity to be honest.
I think it'd worth $30 just as a designer. But you have to be able to code.
4 hours ago by abelsm
Thanks so much for sharing feedback!
In this scenario, your collection is "purchases" and there's a "buyerId" field in a purchase document? And you want to get the email from buyerId?
If buyerId is a uid, you can do another query to get the user document from uid and get the email address from that. I may be misunderstanding the question.
5 hours ago by offtop5
I was very interested up until I saw the pricing. $70 a month is way too much.
A big issue here is just how easy flutter is, I'd rather invest 20 hours once to build it using Dart, then to pay $800 a year.
4 hours ago by abelsm
FlutterFlow cofounder here. Thanks for your input on our pricing.
It's more than knowing how to code, we've been building with Flutter for a while now, but there's still no way we could have coded FlutterMet in under an hour. It would take us 10 hrs+ to manually do that. But it took <1 hour in FlutterFlow.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TXsjnd_4SBo
Also, we allow you to push the generated code to your Github repository, so you don't have to keep paying us once you build your app. :)
4 hours ago by Escapado
To be honest this is the best selling point in my opinion.
It's a great tool for MVP scenarios and especially in business contexts that price tag is entire negligible compared to the hourly rate of most engineers! So a single hour saved will already make up for it.
4 hours ago by offtop5
Anyway you can come down to maybe 30$.
Anything over $50 becomes a line item in my budget, I can't justify spending $50 a month in the hobbyist space. It's a great idea, I just don't think I can really afford it.
4 hours ago by abelsm
We have a $30/mo plan. :)
3 hours ago by notsureaboutpg
To get a workable, usable prototype out the door and even save one day is well worth the monthly price you quoted
3 hours ago by tylerhou
I don't think you're the target audience, then. A startup would be happy spending $70 a month (per developer) if it made their developers even 1% more productive:
$100,000 / 12 * 0.01 == $83.33
(This is a low estimate; the value an engineer delivers to an organization is generally much larger than their compensation.)
It's possible that you believe they should introduce a cheaper tier (hobbyist, open source) with a reduced feature set, but IMO $70 is probably undercharging for most tech corporations.
4 hours ago by treis
On the contrary, that is way too cheap. Equal to approximately 30 minutes a month of a decent iOS developers time. If the product works it should deliver 10-100 times that value.
3 hours ago by offtop5
I mean, they can always grandfather in us early adopters.
It's for a hobby $70 is a bit hard to justify.
5 hours ago by primitivesuave
I'm genuinely curious how easy no-code app development has to become in order to be adopted at scale in the software industry. Right now I'm still getting the sense that most companies prefer to hire a dedicated app development team and have full control over the architecture.
5 hours ago by sgt
Yes, you generally always run into something that the company building your low code tools will need to cater for or fix for you somehow. It gives you so much grief that you might as well write and own your tools.
2 hours ago by swyx
its not a binary.. first of all there are tons of people who have software needs who just dont have that option. Whats the solution, hire you? you're expensive, and you have your own backlog to deal with. *they are bottlenecked by you*.
second of all flutterflow (and other code-exporting builders like webflow) generates code you can take over, so it can even be helpful to people who could code it themselves, all it has to do is save some substantial time, which as a UI builder myself a WYSIWYG tool always does.
4 hours ago by petra
No-code is is limited.
I've read about an hospital management system implemented by low-code. So if it can be useful to that complexity levels, maybe the problem isn't technical, but more about marketing, control over the platform, or just general resistance by software developers.
So i wonder, how long do those shifts towards a much higher productivity platform take in the software industry ?
5 hours ago by poisonborz
Depends on your use case. I'd say everything that is easily adaptable to a certain amount of common settings, is already there: run of the mill webshops, static websites/blogs/cms-es, forms, "info card" apps. And even with these, run if you want to think outside the box. More complex scenarios require so many knobs and switches that anyone working on them has to become a quasi-developer of a much worse and restrictive "language", akin to SAP or Liferay. So other than that above, put all the "no-code" tech besides "disruptive ai big data blockchain augmented reality platform".
3 hours ago by kiawe_fire
IMO, the answer lies somewhere in between.
The biggest benefit I see from the low code movement is, what I hope, will be a trend in bespoke apps where devs like myself spend less time building a single user experience and more time architecting a cohesive system with bespoke âlow codeâ tools on top, that can help enable non-engineer power users to then work within that business-specific framework to craft the screens and user experiences that the masses then use.
Essentially a way to keep the devs doing more actual engineering and architecture work while the more accessible things like âmove this buttonâ or âcreate a screen that shows this data we already haveâ can be made more accessible to more people.
That said, I think general purpose low code solutions meant for all businesses and industries will be more for the MVP / rapid prototyping stages for the most part.
But I could well be proven wrong!
3 hours ago by wpietri
I think the point is more to take a set of common problems out of the software industry. The classic example for me here is the spreadsheet. For many of its uses, it's definitely not as good as bespoke software, but also way better than paying for a dedicated app development team.
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