Great post although I disagree with many of the things. But great post anyway. Thanks!

Have to admit, I can’t hear React Native anymore, it’s been there quite some time now and it has his audience but for me it’s on a dead end. If you think Android is complex? Check out React Native, it’s just a massive monster!

And I keep hearing Facebook Facebook.. do the really use it? It started by a small group inside FB and not at all to related to consumer facing app. Haven’t checked recently if Facebook started to actually use it. Do they?

Of course web developers love it, as they can keep using what they’re used to but you’re the first Android developer ever I hear who like those. Normally coming from something like IntelliJ working with web tools is just horrible but maybe I need to checkout what MS has in the game now. But does it work on Mac? ☺

I agree that companies want to save money and share as much as they can. It was always like this. Nowadays mobile is their main business and of course they’re trying to cut the costs. But the dream of cross platform is out there so long. I’d rather believe that code sharing will be possible than a “write once run anywhere”.. oh wait that was Java right? ;)

But even code sharing with whatever approach I’m sceptical. I did that, I shared code with Android and my other code bases: Java ME and Blackberry Java… and looking back, not sure if this really made us faster. It always goes back to how you describe Google’s code: change X and break Y

So what about the app stores? They have been there from the very first days of Android. I’ve seen and deployed to dozens… was anyone successful? No.

Come on, Samsung who had 80÷ of the devices couldn’t convince their users to use another appstore. Amazon app store? Haven’t heard of big success stories. Please reach me otherwise. The only users are Amazon devices. But who’s that? A few tablet users. Ok there was a Fire phone once but even Amazon likes to think that never existed ;)

There’s a big audience on Amazon store. It’s for FireTV. A platform faaaaaar more successful than Android TV although it’s the same thing under the hood. In some countries even faaar more successful than Chromecast. But compared to phones it’s small numbers. And if you’ve ever had to work with Amazon tools or documentations you’d be better praise Google. It’s just bad. Alternative app stores are as bad as in the early days and that’s a sad thing. I wish Amazon would put effort in it, would out effort in a some Fire TV libraries. Everyone who ever touched leanback knows what I’m talking about. But they don’t, they go for the low hanging fruits. So we should praise the effort Google is putting in the platform.

I agree with all the problems you mentioned and I agree Google is focusing on fixing problems with the big guys but already loosing them. So let’s focus on the majority of developers out there and forget the top 5

So what about flutter? It might be interesting but in the end what you need are the developers. A looot of them! It was always like this. I’ve seen BlackBerry go all the way from the top, not because they had a bad platform (the OS they came up with in te end was superior to Android), but because they couldn’t bring out good tools and forgot about a good language. They had a huge crowd of Java developers and ditched it for c++ and web. All of them went to Android!

Flutter with Dart would have been amazing if Google would have pushed some years ago when it came out. Now the community decided for Kotlin and if anyone is not supporting this, he better not try to compete. It’s the developers who will win this. Not the cost saving companies.

So I don’t see flutter getting the Android devs and won’t get the web devs, so what’s the point? Being fast in development? To be honest, I’m fast writing good code when I wrote good code, test driven code. Can I do this on Flutter? Kotlin was successful as it didn’t lost most of the Java tools the community built around it in the last two decades. Dart can’t offer this in the extend. So it will slow me down long term as teams will not deliver the same quality. They’ll end up in the cycle of rewrites that Android devs did the last decade… so where’s the point?

I’d love to do some iOS.. with my tools and my language. Like web devs like with react native. So I’ll wait a few years and maybe Kotlin native will be there. The war hasn’t even started and maybe it will stay a cold one.