[Disclosure: I’m on the flutter team]

Great article! This is exactly how we think about Flutter — it is analogous to a game engine or a software platform.

There are two ways to do cross-platform: 1) try to take one source and shoehorn it onto multiple incompatible platforms, which ends up with all the problems we hate (e.g., bad performance, LCD features), or 2) add an engine, widgets, and other things to create a new (software) platform that runs well on top of multiple hardware platforms. The latter is what game engines do.

Another example is a portable operating system like Linux, which runs well on everything from embedded systems to supercomputers. Before Linux/Unix, most operating systems were vendor specific, and writing cross-platform software was insanely difficult.

History often repeats itself, and we have spent the last decade repeating history on mobile. With a little luck, those days are now over — “Iron Flutter” (as you call it) is here.