Which leads me to wonder, what would be the reason for doing that rather than just using the system WebView?

I'm currently suffering the pains of developing a Tauri app that relies on the system WebView (which is the default for Tauri). It's unreliable (especially on Windows where people love to mess around and run "debloat" scripts), and causes slight differences on each platform. Tauri lets you bundle the WebView, but this causes the installer to grow like 150 MB. I presume this alternative would be a lot smaller.

After messing around with various cross platform desktop toolkits, including a big Electron app and some smaller Tauri apps, I've settled on Flutter. It's not perfect but the results I'm getting are so far much better than anything I was able to achieve using repurposed web tech.

How is desktop performance and startup times for you with Flutter? I tested some flutter apps like Flutter Folio and they seemed to perform poorly.

At least on the Mac my desktop Flutter app starts up quickly and performs quite well. It’s much smoother in fact than a prototype I built in SwiftUI.

Interesting, thanks for the answer. I wonder if it's just way worse on Windows for some reason.

Afaik bundling webview is only available with appimage. We also have a big tauri app and it is a PITA to develop. I actually opened an issue to support bundling a chromium ala electron.

You won't have to worry about different engines and their edge cases. But at that point we are back to electron, but in rust.

... and with an easy way to control what gets baked into your engine. maybe you don't actually need that Xbox controller driver in your app. :)

Cargo's feature management should make this quite simple.