The popularity metric used in the blog post is "% of Stack Overflow questions that month".

It makes sense that there are fewer "new questions" about an older technology. They've already been asked, you just need to look them up.

They show a chart going on for many years... React Native started showing up just a couple of years before Flutter and it was never even near the current Flutter peak, so I don't understand how you can reach this conclusion.

It can also just mean that Flutter is very confusing while React Native is more intuitive, especially if you already have an JS background.

Also, probably 90% of React Native questions are actually about React rather than the native-specific bits and are going to be the same answers as React for web.

Flutter for web exists, but all those answers are lumped in.

Flutter has its own language (Dart) - my guess is many dart-specific questions are conflated with "flutter" while many JavaScript questions posted by react native devs are not tagged with "react-native".

And many React Native questions are going to be the same as React questions. Generally if I have a question about some React behaviour, I wouldn't mention React Native since I'd want wider audience for answering my React question.

StackOverlow popularity may predate job advertisements, as I think it is more of an indication of early adoption. There is some organisation lag, especially in large enterprises to move from a toolkit to another. SO might be a better indicator on ”what developers want” instead of ”what developers need to do today to get paid.”

StackOverflow popularity most directly is "what are developers having problems with", so if anything it would likely be a lagging indicator.

That said, it may also be a quality indicator: maybe RN users just have fewer problems. Maybe RN community members are better at documenting problems and their solutions outside of StackOverflow?

Anecdotally there is a lot more content for React Native than Flutter. I hang around the subs for both and the amount of lmgtfy answers vs idk is much higher for RN. Most common issues and app design patterns are solved and documented.

Flutter is where RN was three/four years ago, it's far too early to even think about calling it the king of cross platform.

I really need to start asking questions about Zig on StackOverflow instead of reading the docs, reading the stdlib source code, or asking in Discord.

It could also be a leading indicator: a lot of new questions may indicate an influx of people learning to use the framework, whereas for an older, well-established framework most of the beginner questions have already been asked and answered.

I suppose in part it is a matter of perspective:

- Learning a framework is still usage of the framework and so even beginner questions lag "usage" statistics

- Learning a framework is prior to "[Production] usage" of the framework and so beginner questions lead "[Production] usage" statistics and job descriptions

I think I lean a lot more towards the first take, especially in our industry: in general we aren't paid to learn new technology stacks, our companies don't budget for such training costs, and generally don't like it done on company time. Sure we make a big thing about "we are an industry for passion" and often force software developers to moonlight and learn things on their own time/dime "as a hobby", but I wouldn't like to think there are enough moonlighters and "hobbyists" to make something "popular" on Stack Overflow with just beginner questions.

I also think StackOverflow metrics are a lot less relevant today than they were 10 years ago. At one point SO seemed like a critical piece of social infrastructure but now my sense is the software development learning landscape is a lot more disperse.

Discord and Github have submerged a huge amount of the Q&A that used to be on SO.

When my team struggles with a new library or stack, we go to the maintainers' Discord. Most of them seem to really want people to engage there.

Not to mention, according to Appfigures (site that scans app SDK usage), Cordova powers significantly more app store apps than either RN or Flutter.

That's going to lag massively behind the current trends.

It seems inconvenient for the author to mention Cordova.