First off, the Community around FlutterFlow is amazing. Truly top notch people willing to help others solve problems. It's really the main reason I started with FF last year. But if I had to do it all over again, I wouldn't have done it at all. I think the marketing is really misleading with FF. They show all these beautiful UI apps and I think it really stops there. Beautiful UI tool to help people who don't code.
It's actually ironic to me that half of FlutterFlows pre made sheets are dashboard but the main thing on a dashboard cannot actually be done in FlutterFlow natively at all. How is it such a painful task to get a total amount from firebase into FlutterFlow without all this custom code and 3 references online that don't work? In my almost year struggling through FlutterFlow I have learned it's really just a pretty UI. It doesn't actually function well for anything that has data you need to sum. It's a bummer really. I chose FlutterFlow because of the community, how easy it was to get started but after a year and so much frustration, I just have come to the conclusion FlutterFlow is really just for making UI if you actually need to get data to sum and calculate, good luck. :-) I started because nothing worked out of the box for our small business and wanted to make it just for us. It looks pretty, it does certain things really well but at the end of the day, we still have to use spreadsheets or go directly to firebase to calculate data manually. The helpful tips in the community over time don't work when changes are made I'm guessing and thats why solutions dont work. It's also why I really avoid custom anything. I don't have time to spend all day patching every time a process breaks from them updating.
A great group of people in the community for sure, I am forever grateful for all the tips and tricks but sadly, the wife or the boss says its time to hang it up and move back to just spreadsheets and manual data so we can focus on the customer. FlutterFlow is NOT for the everyday person to create these amazing apps they show, it's a tool to get someone started maybe but not something one can build on their business without really being a developer.
Some things to consider if you are in the same boat as I am.
Push Notifications are a pain. Want a notification when data is added to firebase? It doesn't work well. For a single entry, we get 8 of the exact same notifications.
Need to sum any data from your firebase? Not possible in FlutterFlow without being a developer and just writing your own code.
Want to link an asset table row to a specific user? Good luck unless you have everything under authenticated user, it's a pain.
The UI when creating a page you will get tons of errors that say this action would have caused an error so we reverted it for you. Why not tell us why so we can fix it? It does for some things not all.
I'm committed to wrapping up and winding down our app in Jan 25. It's frustrating the amount of hours one puts into a project for it to really cause more harm than good. Have we lost clients? no, but we did damage relationships because we couldn't deliver things I should have figured out right away. My biggest mistake was getting it going, starting out small and moving to the App before every single thing was functional. I quickly realized what I was trying to do was impossible for a normal guy to do in FlutterFlow. :-) that was my mistake, I got sucked into the great videos the company releases and the live streams every Thursday earlier this year. But the majority of the videos were what they are best at, creating really nice looking apps. They never spend much time making them functional.
Just my two cents. I'm just not a developer and whatever anyone tells ya, FlutterFlow maybe low code but low code for UI not functionality like something so simple as 2 + 2. :-)