The “native” Android ecosystem has grown way too over-complicated for my liking. I do not want to dependency inject a Reactive ViewModel Room Repository DAO Purpose Factory (without blocking the main thread), I just want to make a god damn app.
My current wishlist is:
- Be reasonably efficient (we’re working with phones here)
- Be completely open source (i.e. I should be able to throw my app on F-Droid when it’s ready)
- Have a not terrible implementation of Material 3/You
- Don’t be too “janky” for the end user (sorry, PWAs)
- Be reasonably mature
What does this leave me with? Flutter? React Native?
Qt QML works for me. It’s declarative, easy to learn, looks good, you can write logic in JavaScript, or have your code on the backend in C++, or Python with PySide. You can easily iterate on the desktop and run the exact same app on the phone, or TV. It’s fast too. And given you want to go open source, licensing is not a headache (unlike closed source on LGPL Qt).
Generally it’s been my UI of choice for years and I’m pretty happy with it, now with excellent Python support even more so (though I don’t know how, or even if, it’s possible on mobile).
Cool. Does Qt have Material You compatible components?
There’s this https://doc.qt.io/qt-6/qtquickcontrols-material.html available as stock style. I don’t know about “You” variant of material design, so I can’t really say if that’s it. There are a couple of style implementations on GitHub as well.
Thank you! It doesn’t quite look like the native android components but close enough.