I spent most of my career in the gaming industry(apart from the last few years really). To be more specific, mobile gaming. A very lucrative industry but that's a whole different topic. Either way, back in the days when I started, Adobe Flash played a big role. The games the company was developing were banking heavily on Flash: all menus were built with Flash and it worked as a charm on both Android and iOS. At that point Apple had already put the final nails in the coffin but the company I worked for had managed to figure out a hack to keep using it and it worked up until mid 2017. I guess it was around that time Apple figured out the hack the company was making to keep it going. That entire fiasco caused several big shock waves around the company: it wasn't a small company, so there were a fair bit of Flash and ActionScript developers. Also there were several EOL games which the company wanted to keep since money was still flowing in through them so a large amount of people had to deep dive into legacy codebase no one had touched in years, just to re-make the menus using something else.

My point is, Apple has a long history of wanting to keep it's ecosystem closed, which is a huge problem for both large companies and even more so for small publishers and indie developers. It is one of the many reasons I've hated Apple with a passion for as long as I can remember.

Meanwhile I am working on an app with several friends/former co-workers and we opted for Flutter. Since I am the only one who has any experience with smartphones in general, this seemed to be the best candidate. For one, I know Dart more or less - I'm by no means expert in either Flutter or Dart but I can navigate myself with ease and documentation is fairly good. Which is enough to be fairly productive. Also Dart is an OK language overall - at least you know what to expect from it, unlike js or ts.

Having said all that, I won't lie, I have this fear in the back of my mind that at some point Apple will try to lock flutter out of their ecosystem and be like "Tough luck, rewrite it in Swift, deal with it". Which does sound like a very Apple thing to do, even if you are the most die-hard Apple fan.

The situation is bad, there's no way to sugarcoat it. But I'd argue that even with everything I just said, the web is in a worse state. If we roll the tape back to when I wasn't even a teenager, I learned basic HTML by simply looking at Yahoo!'s source. Yes, there weren't fancy animations or shiny colors and whatnot but it was simple enough to get it going. These days, it's an absolute nightmare. A simple "hello world" page adds an ungodly amount of node_modules to your drive, long, slow and convoluted build systems, horrible setup processes and horrible development experience. On the subject of the app we are making, having a few microservices, a few databases, a set of docker images, a docker compose setup for development and kubernetes with ingress for deployment is a lot of work as it is. We can get it up to speed in a matter of a few hours since we have a total of 25-30 years of experience between the 3 of us. But if we have to add web to the equation(which personally I would not mind, considering I'm more likely to use a computer rather than a phone), it would be a catastrophe. We'd need to rope in at least 3 other people to work on that and keep in mind that this is a project for our spare time and we are investing our private time and money. The web is simply not feasible.

In the early 2010's when I was coming out of uni, I would have preferred to work with web out of the two options - you had to endure Apple's products which I wouldn't have wanted to spend money on and you had to endure Java for Android. No way I would want to deal with either of those. But these days, I'd do anything to avoid the web, simply because the web is an absolute mess - I'm far more willing to risk shooting myself in the foot than having to deal with it.