Can Flutter really be called "native", though? As I understand it, it operates like Swing: it draws all of its own widgets. They do their best to emulate the platform's widgets, but it's not using the native APIs for them.

Yes, you are correct.

I think Flutter means native in the sense that it runs at native speed, perhaps even faster in some carefully selected apps

As for a look and feel thing, Flutter widgets feel alright to me..

i'm seeing a lot of complaints on iOS flutter apps of how the UI looks(microstutters/not frame perfect). it's only the usual small vocal minority but boy do they kill your app's reception on the programmer heavy social media

Can you link a specific issue that wasn't immediately a result of a problem with the user code, perhaps too much work on the main thread?

I have found the perf to be just fantastic on android. Especially compared to react native, which is a native offering.

android is fine,it's the iOS side that complains

AFAIK Flutter is "only" for Android and iOS, excluding desktop applications.

The flutter team has announced that it is now working on desktop and web ports of flutter.

What's interesting is that you can literally run the same app on all platforms, because flutter draws the whole ui in dart code, using the canvas. And well, dart can run basically anywhere now...

There are people successfully running Flutter on desktops, but it isn't currently the main thrust of the project.

https://medium.com/flutter-community/flutter-on-desktop-a-re...

I wish I could share this sentiment because Flutter really does look great, but I don't think it will succeed as long as it's based on Dart and not JavaScript.

That's very bold, considering the popularity of JavaScript, an esoteric, joke of a language in earlier times (no offence).

Bottom line, Its very safe to say that dart is a much better language than JS.

The language of choice has never ever, really mattered in software history.

And don't forget that the big G is behind this thing, which is well equipped to push it forward without the need of it being as popular as js.

The big G dropped the ball on Dart 1.0, which was rescued by the AdWords team.

Right now Flutter/Dart looks like an ongoing political war between ChromeOS, Android and Fuchsia.

By the way, Fuchsia is getting Android suport and a new language agnostic UI composition engine, Scenic, so lets see for how long Flutter stays as the Fuchsia official UI toolkit.

Nice point about fushsia.

But isn't the point of a truly cross platform framework just that? So what if fuschia has a different native toolkit. Maybe they are trying to launch a platform specific api that's more bare metal.

I mean Isn't the whole point of flutter is that you take the same app and run it anywhere?

What do you mean with "Fuchsia is getting Android support"?

Android is being ported to work on Fuchsia as well, just like it happened with ChromeOS.

https://android-review.googlesource.com/q/fuchsia