Is anyone using Flutter for Web Apps?
Hello,
I've been recently learning Flutter for Mobile Apps for a couple of business ideas that I have and because I'm always learning new languages/frameworks.
At the same time I wonder if I can also use Flutter to create modern web apps, I know it can be used technically, but is somebody building something with Flutter?
Any pros and cons that I should consider? I probably will endup building at leat one web app just to learn, but always good to collect feedback.
Thanks
Flutter Web App has completely different feeling than standard Web App. For me it's main use-case is building some complex features of apps to be shared between mobile and web app - for example some photo editor
My goal is also primary to check if is a good tool to quickly prototype web apps, by also using Firebase as a backend. Maybe after an MVP I might choose another stack, my personal favorite is still Python/Django.
Haven't released anything yet, but building a Flutter web project for fun. Its performance seems fine when running locally, but I have a long way to go until I test it in the real-world. I've seen a few demos released by Google and in r/flutterdev and look and behave quite decent.
I think you should remember that you cannot build "modern web apps" with Flutter with the sense of modern web apps you can build with Angular/React/Vue etc. You can build what they are used to call RIA (Rich Internet Applications: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_web_application), so be mindful about SEO if you go the Flutter web way.
That is something I'm seeing with my first prototypes, the application is more similar to a single web page application, it's a bit more tricky to keep the URL in sync with the web application, for instance.
I haven't released anything, but I've definitely been tinkering. If you want to see where things stand, the code is on GitHub.
The app is simple for the purposes of experimentation, just something that produces random names and can either delete them or send them to a server-to-be-named-later. You'll notice that I spent a lot of days on it, about a month and a half on the calendar, but it's probably not more than sixteen hours of work, total, since most of the commits are small.
At least in testing, it runs smoothly, and the fact that Google just said "you'll use Material Design" (or whatever one-off you'd call this) simplifies a bunch of decisions. This is my first attempt at mobile development that I didn't immediately abandon, so the fact that it doesn't look terrible is a good sign. I've mostly treated it as desktop software without much flexibility.
My next steps, which will probably happen over the next week or so, will be to finish the companion website---so that the names can be sent somewhere consistent for permanent storage---update the app to use the website and the activation process that I've rigged up, and start submitting the app to the relevant stores.
That last part...I have no clue how it's going to go, but I'm sure I'll unpack everything I learn about how unsuitable Flutter is for various platforms, on my blog.
My attraction was also the Material Design, really hate to have to ticker around CSS and really like the declarative UI tree widget that Flutter allows.
Flutter Web can be used to create web apps and single-page sites which do not require heavy performance. moreover, due to its simplicity, it can be used to create prototypes much faster than others. but if you really want performance and faster loading than react is your go-to option.