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How confident can anyone be basing a core product on flutter given Google's history of abandonment?

by joobus 8y ago

awestroke 8y ago
Rest assured this project too will be abandoned eventually.
megaman821 8y ago
I am especially nervous about Flutter since they don't even have to abandon it. If they don't keep pace with new OS releases, there is no great way to recoup your investment in Flutter. You are just stuck without an outdated looking app or forced to do a full rewrite in the native frameworks.
- samstave 8y ago
  "technical-horizon debt"?
- ozyx 8y ago
  Keep in mind that Flutter is an open-source project with an active community. There's nothing particularly special about the built-in widgets that the Flutter framework provides; other developers can make and publish their own widgets easily enough if the built-in widgets are insufficient.
pier25 8y ago
Google has abandoned products, but has it abandoned technologies?
- stickfigure 8y ago
  Was Wave a product or a technology? Both, I guess. That said, Wave doesn't seem comparable. Maybe GWT? If so, I'd be perfectly happy if Flutter has the lifespan of GWT, which is some 12 years old now and still viable (if perhaps a little crusty). 12 years is a phenomenal run for a piece of frontend tech.
  - benatkin 8y ago
    I'm not completely sure what the difference between a technology and a product is, but I think it was a product, because it was SaaS with only one provider and closed source until the shutdown announcement, and very few developers were integrating with it. Only when the shutdown was announced did they open source it, and it became more of a technology than a product. I think the Android userspace might count as a technology that's been shut down. When Android first came out, it looked a lot like a mobile counterpart to a Linux distro with Gnome or KDE, with built in simple open source apps, like music, photos, downloads, and notes (now Keep). Now all these apps are littered with tie-ins to Google, and Samsung and Huawei have gone off and developed alternatives because it's annoying to use these apps without fully buying into Google (same to a lesser extent for Maps and Chrome). This might be a stretch though, and besides this I don't know of any Google technology that was popular and useful and got shut down in a way that reminds me of Google Reader.
    - Apocryphon 8y ago
      Fabric?
      - benatkin 8y ago
        I'm not too familiar with Fabric, but that sounds like it would count, because it was a technology that external developers were building on that got shut down without a clear migration path.
      - nevi-me 8y ago
        Fabric had it coming. Twitter sold it because they no longer wanted to focus on it. When Google bought it, it felt a lot like buying the market. What Fabric tools are you going to miss, which Firebase does not have/support? It doesn't make sense for Google to maintain two platforms that do the same thing indefinitely. Twitter didn't have viable alternatives. They could have sold it to someone else, but who? - Apple? Forget about Android support - Facebook? Not interested, they killed Parse - Google? Made sense, because the value of Fabric was the number of devs using it. Fabric Crash Analytics was a strong product, why not bring in the team that developed it to gradually bring its features into Firebase? Fabric is not a good example; it wasn't "abandoned" as developers were given alternatives. It also works better for us developers, because now I don't have to bundle a Fabric SDK and a Firebase SDK. Lastly, given that Twitter is shutting down access to third-parties to their API, the value of Fabric's integration with Twitter might have dwindled for some people.
- pjmlp 8y ago
  Every year at Google IO Android APIs get partially rebooted, the NDK already got three build systems, Android Studio is being rebuilt from version to version. Good luck to those that jump today into Android without the background how it grew up since the early days. Documentation is outdated and many of the still documented best practices have long been replaced by Medium posts and SO answers about the new best practices that replaced them. https://medium.com/@steve.yegge/who-will-steal-android-from-google-af3622b6252e https://medium.com/@steve.yegge/who-will-steal-android-from-...
  - Apocryphon 8y ago
    Android development resembles web development?
    - pjmlp 8y ago
      Yes, but they still manage to be more pleasant to work with than building UIs with <div> and CSS, while making it work across any device with something that resembles a browser on them.
benatkin 8y ago
This is something that makes google look better, because not only is it a tool that seems like it has enough momentum that it won't get abandoned, it also brings a forgotten Google product, the Dart programming language, back into the limelight.

How confident can anyone be basing a core product on flutter given Google's history of abandonment?

by joobus 8y ago

How confident can anyone be basing a core product on flutter given Google's history of abandonment?

awestroke 8y ago

Rest assured this project too will be abandoned eventually.

megaman821 8y ago

I am especially nervous about Flutter since they don't even have to abandon it. If they don't keep pace with new OS releases, there is no great way to recoup your investment in Flutter. You are just stuck without an outdated looking app or forced to do a full rewrite in the native frameworks.

samstave 8y ago
"technical-horizon debt"?
ozyx 8y ago
Keep in mind that Flutter is an open-source project with an active community. There's nothing particularly special about the built-in widgets that the Flutter framework provides; other developers can make and publish their own widgets easily enough if the built-in widgets are insufficient.

pier25 8y ago

Google has abandoned products, but has it abandoned technologies?

stickfigure 8y ago
Was Wave a product or a technology? Both, I guess. That said, Wave doesn't seem comparable. Maybe GWT? If so, I'd be perfectly happy if Flutter has the lifespan of GWT, which is some 12 years old now and still viable (if perhaps a little crusty). 12 years is a phenomenal run for a piece of frontend tech.
- benatkin 8y ago
  I'm not completely sure what the difference between a technology and a product is, but I think it was a product, because it was SaaS with only one provider and closed source until the shutdown announcement, and very few developers were integrating with it. Only when the shutdown was announced did they open source it, and it became more of a technology than a product. I think the Android userspace might count as a technology that's been shut down. When Android first came out, it looked a lot like a mobile counterpart to a Linux distro with Gnome or KDE, with built in simple open source apps, like music, photos, downloads, and notes (now Keep). Now all these apps are littered with tie-ins to Google, and Samsung and Huawei have gone off and developed alternatives because it's annoying to use these apps without fully buying into Google (same to a lesser extent for Maps and Chrome). This might be a stretch though, and besides this I don't know of any Google technology that was popular and useful and got shut down in a way that reminds me of Google Reader.
  - Apocryphon 8y ago
    Fabric?
    - benatkin 8y ago
      I'm not too familiar with Fabric, but that sounds like it would count, because it was a technology that external developers were building on that got shut down without a clear migration path.
    - nevi-me 8y ago
      Fabric had it coming. Twitter sold it because they no longer wanted to focus on it. When Google bought it, it felt a lot like buying the market. What Fabric tools are you going to miss, which Firebase does not have/support? It doesn't make sense for Google to maintain two platforms that do the same thing indefinitely. Twitter didn't have viable alternatives. They could have sold it to someone else, but who? - Apple? Forget about Android support - Facebook? Not interested, they killed Parse - Google? Made sense, because the value of Fabric was the number of devs using it. Fabric Crash Analytics was a strong product, why not bring in the team that developed it to gradually bring its features into Firebase? Fabric is not a good example; it wasn't "abandoned" as developers were given alternatives. It also works better for us developers, because now I don't have to bundle a Fabric SDK and a Firebase SDK. Lastly, given that Twitter is shutting down access to third-parties to their API, the value of Fabric's integration with Twitter might have dwindled for some people.
pjmlp 8y ago
Every year at Google IO Android APIs get partially rebooted, the NDK already got three build systems, Android Studio is being rebuilt from version to version. Good luck to those that jump today into Android without the background how it grew up since the early days. Documentation is outdated and many of the still documented best practices have long been replaced by Medium posts and SO answers about the new best practices that replaced them. https://medium.com/@steve.yegge/who-will-steal-android-from-google-af3622b6252e https://medium.com/@steve.yegge/who-will-steal-android-from-...
- Apocryphon 8y ago
  Android development resembles web development?
  - pjmlp 8y ago
    Yes, but they still manage to be more pleasant to work with than building UIs with <div> and CSS, while making it work across any device with something that resembles a browser on them.

benatkin 8y ago

This is something that makes google look better, because not only is it a tool that seems like it has enough momentum that it won't get abandoned, it also brings a forgotten Google product, the Dart programming language, back into the limelight.