Venture doesn't necessarily mean bad. Long term the goal the goal is to dissolve the gates to Apple and Google's walled gardens, which I personally believe is a net good.
As much is the idealist in me wants to do that with no venture backing, the realist in me knows we need Dioxus to be self sustaining and providing legitimate value for people to switch. Google spends 76 million dollars a year on catering alone - there's no way you can compete with Android and Flutter without huge resources.
Apple and Google capture the value for their platforms via fees and lock-in. Our goal is to capture value by providing really good utilities for building and deploying apps. You can't move heaven and earth without a really big lever, and venture gives us more leverage.
Yes, we're looking at something like a Vercel/Expo model, probably built on Fly, Cloudflare, or AWS, but designed to be self hosted.
We've got a decent amount of enterprise adoption and I think there's money to be made by selling something like a self-hosted Vercel. TBD on licensing - I'd want it to be open source but we wouldn't want people reselling our deploy platform.
We raised a seed to prove that people want to build with dioxus. If that hypotheses is validated, then we invest in the deploy model. If not, we have OSS grants and corporate sponsors that will keep the project alive for years even if the VC money runs out.
I'm not super interested in making money at the hobbyist tier - those developers are our evangelists. Enterprise self hosting is likely harder but I think we can provide a lot of value to teams building apps in large companies.
As a former Expo employee and someone who took a run at this space (moxie) before running out of steam, it’s really exciting to hear this is the approach you’re taking! I’ll be keeping an eye out :).
Cool stuff man, wishing you and the team all the best as a person who quite often uses Flutter for side projects but isn't a big fan of Dart. Any ETA on it being stable/1.0?
Stable/1.0 is always tough to call, and you can't predict the future of course, but it does seem obvious that enterprise value 1.0 software. It's more likely that we 1.0 different pieces of the stack (core, rsx!, html) so the ecosystem can build on top of stable primitives. We probably couldn't 1.0 the renderers themselves for a while.
It's probably another year of iteration until I feel like we're 100% stable, but my penchant for another rewrite is at an all time low.
Flutter is written in Dart but renders to a canvas on the web making it a very, very poor choice for web apps. Especially backend/fullstack apps. Plus you can't use tailwind or whatever flavor of css library there is today. Flutter just nailed the "get up and running" part which we've got as well: `cargo binstall dioxus-cli`, `dx new`, `dx bundle` is literally less than 30 seconds. Hopefully `dx deploy` coming soon.
Electron is... it's electron. A whole chromium instance, an IPC bridge between your frontend and the system, NodeJS, etc. If you compile for size, our desktop apps are 3mb. You can easily deploy them on an embedded/low end device. We're hoping to eat some market share in the embedded-ish land (not true embedded, but like industrial or POS).
Dioxus also has mobile and desktop compatible server functions which basically no other projects have. Expo has been kinda exploring this space. One of our examples is deploying your own LLM on your own infrastructure with a dioxus mobile app UI and it fits in a single file and builds in under a minute.
Thanks, wasn't aware of Expo, though it seems to only do mobile+web apps but not desktop apps?
> If you compile for size, our desktop apps are 3mb.
I'm aware of this from familiarity with Tauri, but hearing it again still amazes me. Very cool.
I have an app in mind I want to build, and really would like to have standalone versions on Android+iOS+Linux+Mac+Windows, plus a web app. But there's no way I can manage all that as a single developer. And the fact no development tool has really nailed this yet is telling how hard it is. Whoever really gets this right will save a ton of developer hours across the industry, and that's valuable. Good luck, hope you guys pull it off!
PS - one feature request: a local/offline-first mode that eases development of apps that work even with poor or no internet connection. Basically I want to build something like Obsidian that is multi-platform, and does all processing and data storage locally first, in an accessible format like SQLLite or flat files, then syncs with the cloud when available, all with as few developer resources as possible. A tool that enables that would be amazing.
As much is the idealist in me wants to do that with no venture backing, the realist in me knows we need Dioxus to be self sustaining and providing legitimate value for people to switch. Google spends 76 million dollars a year on catering alone - there's no way you can compete with Android and Flutter without huge resources.
Apple and Google capture the value for their platforms via fees and lock-in. Our goal is to capture value by providing really good utilities for building and deploying apps. You can't move heaven and earth without a really big lever, and venture gives us more leverage.