As a "batteries included" framework Qt is undoubtably amazing but I used it on a project recently and it struck me as dated compared to Flutter or React Native. Maybe I'm doing it wrong but I had to write a lot of boilerplate C++ even when using QML. The layout engine feels byzantine. The state management is mostly manual. Flutter is a lot more consistent, reactive, and all done in one way (Dart) and it supports hot reload natively. It was a more pleasant experience overall.
And React has that "web development" ecosystem taint... I'd definitely lean towards Flutter in this case. It's neat, tidy and a contained ecosystem. It may not be fully perfect, but for cross platform UI's I think it's the way to go.
My only question is - say if one uses Rust, is flutter_rust_bridge the way to go?
Ah, I love rustdesk. I didn't know it was Flutter based. Only minor complaint about Rustdesk is that when you send the official link to people, they are frightened by a big scary "Scammer" alert[1]. To you and me, we immediately understand its actual purpose, but to non technical folks they hesitate to click it. I've seen this too many times.
Qt has been going strong for 2+ decades and you can bet will do so for at least that many more. Flutter is by Google and it exists when I started writing this comment but we can't say for sure it will when I'm done writing it
I'm a bit out of the loop but I checked out the GitHub repo [0] and while the authors moved onto Slint the crate is still actively maintained. That said I also looked at the latest commits and that threw me down a rabbit hole of finding out that the main maintainer has a blog where he wrote about using Sailfish OS as a daily driver [1] and imagine my surprise when he revealed that he actually co-maintains a Signal client app for SailfishOS too. I looked into the GitLab repo for that app [2] and I gleefully discovered that it's mostly written in Rust, the Cargo.toml contains a dependency to qmetaobject-rs too.
All that is to say that I'm glad there's another way to get Rust on mobile aside from stuff like flutter_rust_bridge.
As a "batteries included" framework Qt is undoubtably amazing but I used it on a project recently and it struck me as dated compared to Flutter or React Native. Maybe I'm doing it wrong but I had to write a lot of boilerplate C++ even when using QML. The layout engine feels byzantine. The state management is mostly manual. Flutter is a lot more consistent, reactive, and all done in one way (Dart) and it supports hot reload natively. It was a more pleasant experience overall.
And React has that "web development" ecosystem taint... I'd definitely lean towards Flutter in this case. It's neat, tidy and a contained ecosystem. It may not be fully perfect, but for cross platform UI's I think it's the way to go.
My only question is - say if one uses Rust, is flutter_rust_bridge the way to go?
flutter_rust_bridge is what rustdesk uses with pretty good success, it's where I first discovered it.
Ah, I love rustdesk. I didn't know it was Flutter based. Only minor complaint about Rustdesk is that when you send the official link to people, they are frightened by a big scary "Scammer" alert[1]. To you and me, we immediately understand its actual purpose, but to non technical folks they hesitate to click it. I've seen this too many times.
[1] https://github.com/rustdesk/rustdesk/releases
Qt has been going strong for 2+ decades and you can bet will do so for at least that many more. Flutter is by Google and it exists when I started writing this comment but we can't say for sure it will when I'm done writing it
I'm a bit out of the loop but I checked out the GitHub repo [0] and while the authors moved onto Slint the crate is still actively maintained. That said I also looked at the latest commits and that threw me down a rabbit hole of finding out that the main maintainer has a blog where he wrote about using Sailfish OS as a daily driver [1] and imagine my surprise when he revealed that he actually co-maintains a Signal client app for SailfishOS too. I looked into the GitLab repo for that app [2] and I gleefully discovered that it's mostly written in Rust, the Cargo.toml contains a dependency to qmetaobject-rs too.
All that is to say that I'm glad there's another way to get Rust on mobile aside from stuff like flutter_rust_bridge.
[0] https://github.com/woboq/qmetaobject-rs
[1] https://www.rubdos.be/2026/04/17/my-sailfish-os-journey-apps...
[2] https://gitlab.com/whisperfish/whisperfish