> Flutter is the only realistic option for true cross platform UIs that run everywhere.
Do you really want cross platform everywhere? You might want it but what you inevitably get is something that is huge and just okay everywhere instead of something truly great anywhere. Is that a trade off you are happy with as a user?
That said, I do happily use a couple of cross platform applications. PyCharm and SublimeText which are great and Fusion 360 which is powerful but awful to use.
Who is “we”? As a user I want highly polished, efficient apps. That pretty much rules out anything built with a cross platform toolkit. (Games are a major exception.)
As a developer, I personally want to make those kinds of programs too. I periodically check into the state of the cross platform toolkits and frankly they really aren’t any better than they were a decade ago.
Separating out a UI layer that is unique in each platform helps and writing with native toolkits helps, but there are still fundamental differences that you can’t really abstract away.
I think the biggest market for these toolkits is in enterprise software. There, lowering development costs seems to be more important than anything else.
I think this assumption that cross platform UI solutions can’t be extremely fast is a very strange one.
There have been some bad efforts at this in the past which is maybe how you arrived at the conclusion but the concept of Flutter is pretty straightforward and not dissimilar to games in some sense where you just need to push pixels to a screen.
They even have a some game engineers who used to work at EA on the team. One even wrote a popular book on it https://gameprogrammingpatterns.com/
Like in short, Flutter is going to be fine. It compiles to native code that just needs to push pixels to a screen, it has a bunch of smart people on it and some extremely heavy incentives to get this right.
As a user, I want native apps with some added value compared to web apps. I don't actually care about "polished", 60fps and things like that. So we are in a different camps.
Do you really want cross platform everywhere? You might want it but what you inevitably get is something that is huge and just okay everywhere instead of something truly great anywhere. Is that a trade off you are happy with as a user?
That said, I do happily use a couple of cross platform applications. PyCharm and SublimeText which are great and Fusion 360 which is powerful but awful to use.