FlutterFlow: Low-code Flutter apps

FlutterFlow cofounder here! We thought the HN crowd would want to see the generated code for FlutterMet, so here it is: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;FlutterFlow&#x2F;FlutterMetSample&#x2F;tree&#x2F;flutterflow" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;FlutterFlow&#x2F;FlutterMetSample&#x2F;tree&#x2F;flutter...</a><p>We try to generate clean Flutter code that follows best practices – we have a long way to go, but we couldn&#x27;t be more excited.<p>Edit: Also, here&#x27;s the video of us building it (in just under an hour): <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;TXsjnd_4SBo" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;TXsjnd_4SBo</a>

I wish you success. I really like Dart and the concept of Flutter.<p>However: I&#x27;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.<p>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.

Initially this looks really nice - very much the kind of tooling I’ve thought about for Flutter since I started using it.<p>This product aside, though, I find it funny how the whole “reactive widget tree that gets rebuilt when data changes” and “everything is just nested objects with properties, no XML needed” trend felt like “backlash” against the UI Builders, Visual Basics, and Glades.<p>And yet now we’re building visual tools to control all the nested reactive component frameworks very much in that same vein.

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.<p>Kind of like a quick way of getting the look you want, and then pasting it back into Android Studio. Even then I&#x27;d change and improve the code - I see that the styles are a bit &quot;hard coded&quot; with a variety of fonts I have never seen the need to use.<p>The UI is a bit laggy on Safari.

I&#x27;ve tried it out, registered for the premium to check out the details.<p>Biggest problem: querying Firebase is problematic. I can bind a collection to a ListView, but in many cases I&#x27;d like to map a field to something. For example I have a list of &quot;purchases&quot; and I&#x27;d like to map the &quot;buyerId&quot; to an email address. This can&#x27;t be done, and the generated code is hard to adapt to this kind of use case.<p>And therein lies the complexity to be honest.<p>I think it&#x27;d worth $30 just as a designer. But you have to be able to code.

In theory, I love the idea of web builders such as this. I think creating simple CRUD apps is still surprisingly difficult but this tool seems to strike the right balance between complexity and simplicity. At least from the marketing it appears that way. I look forward to playing around with this and I hope for continued integration with as many tools as possible.

At the risk of being a grump, is this yet another thing that could probably be as good as HyperCard, but won&#x27;t because monetizing these sort of heavily creative things tends not to work?

I was very interested up until I saw the pricing. $70 a month is way too much.<p>A big issue here is just how easy flutter is, I&#x27;d rather invest 20 hours once to build it using Dart, then to pay $800 a year.

I&#x27;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&#x27;m still getting the sense that most companies prefer to hire a dedicated app development team and have full control over the architecture.

I am conflicted about Flutter. Is it worth learning, over, say Angular (for web) or Xamarin (for mobile and cross platform stuff)?<p>Flutter for web was just released after a long time in beta stage. It looks like a good language and framework, but I don&#x27;t see many options for customization. And frankly, the UI composition syntax is tasteless, in my view (Compared to React, which is awesome, or Angular, which is verbose and complex but still understandable)

I am still looking for the equivalent of Visual Basic for making modern Web and mobile apps.<p>It is exciting that we might finally be getting there!

&gt; <i>Check out an app, FlutterMet, that we built in under an hour!</i><p>That&#x27;s great, but how quickly can you:<p>- get new developers up to speed in an existing product?<p>- add a new feature to an existing product?<p>- debug a non-trivial issue?

Does this only support Firebase for now? Are there plans to support &quot;regular&quot; APIs for both auth and querying?

Can it talk to a GraphQL backend ?

Is it possible to write completely custom components?

Does it support push notifications?

Considering one has to hand write an ios approach and a material design one unless they support the Flutter Platform widgets plugins most of your would probably need to avoid this.<p>My bias, I am not the project lead on flutter Platform widgets but I am one of the lower end contributors.

The low-codeness is certainly impressive. Judging from the sample app though, Flutter still has a long way to go in terms of native look-and-feel (on iOS at least).