App devs -- anyone tried Flutter?

I started learning mobile app development a few months ago, and I started with NativeScript for a few reasons. First, I was already familiar with all the languages and frameworks it uses - typescript/javascript, html/css, angular. Second, it seems to be pretty mature with lots of users and plugins. And third, I am just building something seemingly pretty simple (your basic list->details style app), so I wasn't concerned about any potential performance problems.

Man, was I wrong about that last part. Maybe I just don't know what I'm doing (likely), but I just could not get it to work smoothly at all. Maybe I had some weird plugin interactions going on (I'm using Cloud Firestore), but any time I updated any data, my list view would take anywhere between half a second and multiple seconds to update, and the entire UI would freeze in the meantime. I spent weeks/months trying to figure out the root of the problem, but I couldn't hack it.

So I'm starting over.

I had looked at Flutter before I started with NativeScript, but I decided against it after looking at some code. It uses Dart (which I had never touched before), and the whole style of doing things was pretty foreign to me. I'm probably not explaining it correctly, but instead of laying everything out and styling it like with HTML/CSS, everything is a "widget". Text is a widget. Cards are widgets. Layouts are widgets. Padding is a widget! It's just nested widgets everywhere, widgets all the way down. It looked pretty confusing to me.

But I dove in a couple days ago anyway, and I am glad that I did. After maybe 3 days, my app is looking sharp. I've got it all hooked up to Firestore, adding and modifying docs. My list views are fast as hell, updates happen instantly. It is so fast that I had to triple check that it was actually doing everything it was supposed to do.

It will probably take me a few weeks to add all the features my old NS version has, but that is much faster than I could get things done in NS. It seemed like every little thing I tried to do, I had to jump through a dozen hoops to get it to work correctly.

Flutter is totally different. It seems easy to do things even though I'm still coming to grips with the language and the framework itself. I'm sure I will hit a few stumbling blocks along the way, but so far this looks very promising.