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If I could fix one thing in Flutter with a magic wand, it would be scrolling. There's something fundamentally different how Flutter apps scroll compared to native views. E.g. on Android overscroll doesn't look well when flinging, on iOS the keyboard will never affect the scrollable in intuitive way.

This is fixable. I’d encourage you to play with github.com/flutter/plat... if you haven’t.

Do you recommend looking at scroll_overlay?

Yeah. That was a tool we built a long time ago to debug this kind of thing. @gregprice.bsky.social recently used it to improve Android scrolling as well.

Any tips on how to make best use of it?

I haven't used it in a long time. The idea of those tools is to show a Flutter control over the top of a "native" control and compare pixels and gesture responses. scroll_overlay was one where you just scrolled and it had stripes in both iOS and Flutter so you could see how they differed.

It works quite well -- i.e. it shows that the scrollables behave differently e.g. they don't always respond to some gestures, in the example below to pausing the _fling_

I'm sure patches are very welcome! Both to the tool and the underlying framework code. If you search around in the issues database you'll find lots of other bugs on this looking at differences in other OS versions.

One of the *original* reasons we created Flutter was to have perfect, interact-able animations (e.g. that you could stop a drawer, mid fling). So I'm absolutely certain it's possible to be perfect here. My guess is just no one has looked in a while.

And I must say it still delivers on that. One of my favorite features we have is the HR chart where you can play with handles when selecting the activity duration, one of the most enjoyable things to build, and the built-in gesture detection was just enough for it

Why wasn't it enough and how did you fix it?