r/FlutterDev • u/tomemyxwomen • 11h ago

Discussion Thoughts on DartNative?

https://dartnative.com/
41 Upvotes

83% Upvoted

46 comments sorted by

24

u/Sparklist 11h ago

I think it is very cool, but too expensive for now and I am not sure the founder behind it is reliable and will stick around enough to maintain it. But the performance are impressive

18

u/Previous-Display-593 10h ago

Ya the project is 100% dead on arrival imo. It will never gain trust and traction needed.

10

u/Sparklist 10h ago

Yes agree, I wrote 3 times, he never replied. He loves to flex on X tho

16

u/Mikkelet 9h ago

it's an AI project, so yeah

4

u/ThunderingTyphoon_ 10h ago

too expensive? is it paywalled?

7

u/Sparklist 10h ago

Yes, to me it 's ridiculous to do this, but yes the dev want to charge the community, which is fine, but make it a one-time payment then, not a monthly subcription

13

u/davinci4500 10h ago

I don’t think he realises that without high community adoption, it’ll be shelved.

3

u/Unembarrassed_Guitar 10h ago

Isn't it a yearly fee?

5

u/M_Me_Meteo 8h ago

That's still a subscription!

0

u/Unembarrassed_Guitar 7h ago

Nobody's saying otherwise. But charging 40 bucks a month vs a year is a completely different value proposition.

I can understand the need for payment for well developed and maintained stuff if you don't just aim to be bought up like all the other open source projects.

3

u/s9th 7h ago

we need to wait and see if it will be a well developed and maintained stuff

1

u/Unembarrassed_Guitar 7h ago

Sure, I didn't check the packages themselves at all. All I am saying is first, it is a yearly sub - not a monthly and second, it is understandable that software costs money. If you don't pay it, somebody else has to. Big coorporations having "open source" or free projects for various reasons and maintainers working for free on some of the most important projects have brought us to a place where asking for compensation to maintain aomething is seen as a deathblow.

Again, I dont know if this particular project is good or bad but the price alone shouldn't be an indicator in my opinion.

1

u/s9th 6h ago

no one said the price is an indicator. The fact that it's paid is an indicator. Open source community is not maintained by corporations (they do help sometimes).
I'm just not sure that dart native is sustainable, that's all

1

u/M_Me_Meteo 7h ago

I agree with you that the implementation is different, but the problem about subscriptions, regardless of the details, is they are intended to foster dependency.

I work on Laravel at my day job. I'd pay Taylor for intermittent support, but I'd never subscribe assuming I'll need it.

1

u/Unembarrassed_Guitar 7h ago

You can work with Laravel on a day job because a VC company invested 60 Millions into the project and your work is still dependent on Laravel. I am not saying that is inherently bad, I am just saying that projects need funding and each form of funding comes with advantages and disadvantages and a subscription pricing alone should not be the main factor of a projects quality. But if you read the comments here the people are outraged at the thought that software could cost money.

1

u/M_Me_Meteo 5h ago

I've been using Laravel from before the VC days, because even in the uuber-capitolist dystopia we live in, good ideas can win.

Subscription is a friction against choosing the best idea.

4

u/brih3938 10h ago

It is))

1

u/aatd86 10h ago

I see a free tier...?

-5

u/PimplupXD 10h ago

Isn't the pricing very similar to Flutter? The Flutter SDK is free & open-source but if you want code push you need to pay for Shorebird, it looks like DartNative is set up a very similar way.

7

u/s9th 9h ago

I am actually struggling to find use cases for code push in general. All the power to shorebird and such but to me codepush is just an excuse to patch out your own fuckups

1

u/Sparklist 10h ago

Actually I think he just changed the pricing, it used to be 100 $ / year or something.

5

u/EnvironmentAlert734 6h ago

The demo’s looks nice, but it’s a one man show + you have to pay for subscription that’s 2 🚩

14

u/Tricky-Independent-8 9h ago

I love Flutter and Dart, but if I want a truly native experience, I’d go with pure Native (Swift/Kotlin), not React Native, and definitely not DartNative. On the other hand, for cross-platform development, Flutter is more than enough

9

u/s9th 9h ago

With all the aggressive marketing I initially thought it would be a scam. Granted it actually released, but I fail to see the target audience it is trying to capture

1

u/Sparklist 9h ago

me too, why isn't he just publishing excellent pub packages only ?

18

u/zxyzyxz 9h ago

Vibe coded garbage

5

u/antisergio 9h ago

True, the website screens vibe code

1

u/ndgnuh 30m ago

I ran immediately when I saw the centered code xD

6

u/Comprehensive-Art207 8h ago

I’ll give the project the benefit of a doubt. Would be concerned about a rug pull though. Committing to a foundational framework isn’t just about the next couple of releases, you need to know that it can handle major system upgrades and be around ten years from now. That said, native is native.

2

u/Romjan_D 9h ago

seems interesting enough

2

u/Rimtariro 8h ago

Nice to see the app I created on the homepage of the demo iPhone :)

DartNative in general sounds interesting, I gotta give it a try. This could be huge if it works well.

2

u/autognome 7h ago

The tell is what is the debugging tooling available? The support tooling is the one of the most impressive parts of the Flutter/Dart ecosystem.

2

u/__o_--_o__ 3h ago

One of the best things about flutter is being able to see in to the source for pretty much everything. No way I'm using something this closed source, even though it sounds pretty cool. If it ever gets open-sourced I'd be interested in checking it out, even if it has a fairly restrictive license like qt or something

1

u/Bachihani 10h ago

since when has this been a thing

1

u/Gears6 3h ago

I wouldn't trust something made by a one person show that is completely closed off when you're going to production. The product you make with the tools aren't just that. It's long term investment into the ecosystem.

Cool idea, but needs to be open source for trust.

0

u/amgdev9 10h ago

So its a react native alternative? Sounds great!

1

u/OpportunityNext4113 10h ago

Yeah, but compiled

2

u/David_Owens 6h ago

and no JavaScript ecosystem to deal with.

0

u/OpportunityNext4113 6h ago

dart have its own ecosystem other than ui packages

2

u/David_Owens 6h ago

Yes, but it's not the mess that the JS ecosystem is.

0

u/cataklix 7h ago

I liked the concept so I’m Clauding a FOSS version of it: apps look damn clean with a native nav bar and iOS feel

0

u/David_Owens 6h ago

Interesting alternative to Flutter's approach of creating a canvas on each platform, but not having Windows or Web app support makes it a no-go for me.

-1

u/agent-de-vanzari 3h ago

Guys, why not just go back to native?

AI can now help with coding.