aaand we're all the way back to Flash.

Adobe (now Apache) Flex.

Until a blind person contacts your support team to tell them your website/webapp is not working with their screen reader.

Flutter has accessibility FYI. It creates a parallel accessibility tree in the DOM that screen readers can read.

https://docs.flutter.dev/development/accessibility-and-local...

hah. I remember having to build HTML-only fallback versions of fancy Flash UI sites back in... 2002 to around 2008. We marketed this as an add-on for improved SEO. Allegedly Google used to manually check if the content matched what was in the Flash version and knock you down if it wasn't. That was probably just a rumor.

The lack of native scrolling kills it for me. It's painfully obvious using a flutter app on iOS, since the scrolling momentum is way off.

You never really think this stuff matters until you're exposed to it.

To be fair web content can also be ported easily pretty much everywhere because browsers run almost everywhere.

But it's more fun to rebuild the DOM inside a canvas. Then you can run it in another DOM inside a canvas inside a DOM, and stream the whole thing from a server into a thin client and call it a native app.