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[Flutter Eng. Dir here] We were also not satisfied with the performance of the initial GPay release. We've been working with the GPay team the last couple mont

[Flutter Eng. Dir here] We were also not satisfied with the performance of the initial GPay release. We've been working with the GPay team the last couple months and have made significant improvements within both Flutter and the GPay app. Hopefully the next release of GPay will be out soon and others will be able to see the progress we're continuing to make with the team.

greatgib 6y ago
so, if I read you well, you agree that Flutter or what you did with it clearly sucks? But still, you don't care that the Google blog post lie by telling the opposite of the real dev experience and the application user feedbacks?
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
ignoramous 6y ago
Thanks. Not related to Flutter but Google in general: I recently hit a hard-to-reproduce bug with Jetpack's LiveData for which there's already an open issue created by a third-party developer. I don't recall but it had been open since 2018 with no updates whatsoever from Google engineers on its progress. And therein lies a frustrating problem for engineers not working at Google but using Google tech. There is simply no alternate universe where a third-party team gets the level of access the way you described the Google Pay team did. Of course, it helps that the stakeholders are in the same company, but my point is, shouldn't there be a Flutter Foundation where every developer can feel at home on equal footing with other Googlers? Flutter is so promising, and yet, at the same time, I don't want to end up being slave to its complexities with no way out as a third-party small development shop. Despite that, I'm 99% porting my cross-platform app to Flutter after strong reviews from other developers I know.
- distances 6y ago
  Android development is like that; you hit a framework bug, you'll expect it will never get fixed. Just find a workaround and accept it's what it is.
  - dep_b 6y ago
    At least with iOS you know it will take three years for something to come out of beta but then it's pretty solid. It's just Xcode that never gets fixed.
- Hixie 6y ago
  I can't speak for Jetpack, but as far as Flutter goes: Flutter is open source, we do all our work in the open. File a bug; we look at all our incoming bugs and there are members of the Flutter team (volunteers as well as people from Nevercode and Google) who try to reproduce each issue. We don't always have the bandwidth to fix everything, but last year we fixed roughly as many bugs as were filed, so the odds are pretty good. (And of course you're welcome to try to fix the bug yourself, we accept PRs from anyone, not just Googlers. See our contributor guide on GitHub.) We don't have an official foundation, but we are already operating more or less as openly as we would if we did. We have contributions from lots of companies and volunteers; the majority of the people who have contributor access in fact aren't from the Google Flutter team.
- vendiddy 6y ago
  We are using Flutter at our company and it's far from a black box if you get stuck. For example, try going to a TextField widget and use go-to-definition view the source source code. You can go very far down the go-to-definition hole. Even to the point where you can see where the blinking cursor is being rendered. For several "blockers" we did have, we were able to copy/paste the Flutter implementations, rename them, and modify them to fit our own needs.
- dshpala 6y ago
  Hmm, LiveData is pretty straightforward class, over the years I think I memorized its implementation. I'm curious what's the issue is?
  - ignoramous 6y ago
    The bug is, on ocassion, while executing a query, LiveData would hit EACCESS trying to open the table (?): https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/170228126 https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/170228126 It had to do with their Invalidation tracker (a table, I believe, which is a living log of ordered updates that need to be delivered to observers).
bkm 6y ago
Relevant: https://www.reddit.com/r/FlutterDev/comments/jwmepu/very_poor_performance_of_new_google_pay_app/ https://www.reddit.com/r/FlutterDev/comments/jwmepu/very_poo... https://thomasmiddel.medium.com/flutter-its-poor-ios-performance-84ec1eacd235 https://thomasmiddel.medium.com/flutter-its-poor-ios-perform...
rubicon33 6y ago
Flutter used to be such a great experience, but something happened ~6 months ago that totally derailed it. It brings my late 2016 MBP to a crawl if I am building on iOS simulator. After reading online about it being related to Metal, and needing to switch flutter channels, trying that, and still seeing no success... I just gave up on Flutter (for now). Maybe Flutter 2 has resolved this?
- eseidelGoogle 6y ago
  [Flutter Eng. Dir here] I would love to learn more about your experience. Would you be willing to file an issue and either post it here or CC me on it? flutter.dev/support
  - rubicon33 6y ago
    This closed issue from 2018 appears to be the same issue I was experiencing in ~mid 2020. FWIW, I was also using Rive animations in my app. https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/21445 https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/21445
ROARosen 6y ago
> We've been working with the GPay team the last couple months and have made significant improvements within both Flutter and the GPay app So seriously, how can you reassure any indie dev not getting VIP support to optimize their app for laggyness, that they can easily produce a decently performant app?
- Hixie 6y ago
  Many of the lessons we learn with GPay directly fed into improvements in the framework, improvements in our tooling to make this kind of debugging much easier, and better documentation to try to scale the knowledge to the whole community. Some of these have already shipped (see e.g. new features in our DevTools) and much more will continue to deploy over the coming months.
ywei3410 6y ago
Hi, Could you elaborate on some types of applications which wouldn't or would be a good fit for Flutter at the moment? There's a lot of comments and links to applications both working and non-working; but I don't really have a good gauge as to what works and doesn't.
dmitriid 6y ago
The ad: > Google Pay switched to Flutter a few months ago for their flagship mobile app, and they already achieved major gains in productivity and quality. And then, the reality: > We were also not satisfied with the performance of the initial GPay release. Ah, the classic false advertisement. Let me re-write the ad for you: > Thanks to several-months-long involvement of Flutter's development we could finally fix some of the issues plaguing our app that we re-wrote in Flutter. We're still not close to the release, and we only hope it will be better.

greatgib 6y ago

so, if I read you well, you agree that Flutter or what you did with it clearly sucks? But still, you don't care that the Google blog post lie by telling the opposite of the real dev experience and the application user feedbacks?

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

ignoramous 6y ago

Thanks. Not related to Flutter but Google in general: I recently hit a hard-to-reproduce bug with Jetpack's LiveData for which there's already an open issue created by a third-party developer. I don't recall but it had been open since 2018 with no updates whatsoever from Google engineers on its progress. And therein lies a frustrating problem for engineers not working at Google but using Google tech. There is simply no alternate universe where a third-party team gets the level of access the way you described the Google Pay team did. Of course, it helps that the stakeholders are in the same company, but my point is, shouldn't there be a Flutter Foundation where every developer can feel at home on equal footing with other Googlers? Flutter is so promising, and yet, at the same time, I don't want to end up being slave to its complexities with no way out as a third-party small development shop. Despite that, I'm 99% porting my cross-platform app to Flutter after strong reviews from other developers I know.

distances 6y ago
Android development is like that; you hit a framework bug, you'll expect it will never get fixed. Just find a workaround and accept it's what it is.
- dep_b 6y ago
  At least with iOS you know it will take three years for something to come out of beta but then it's pretty solid. It's just Xcode that never gets fixed.
Hixie 6y ago
I can't speak for Jetpack, but as far as Flutter goes: Flutter is open source, we do all our work in the open. File a bug; we look at all our incoming bugs and there are members of the Flutter team (volunteers as well as people from Nevercode and Google) who try to reproduce each issue. We don't always have the bandwidth to fix everything, but last year we fixed roughly as many bugs as were filed, so the odds are pretty good. (And of course you're welcome to try to fix the bug yourself, we accept PRs from anyone, not just Googlers. See our contributor guide on GitHub.) We don't have an official foundation, but we are already operating more or less as openly as we would if we did. We have contributions from lots of companies and volunteers; the majority of the people who have contributor access in fact aren't from the Google Flutter team.
vendiddy 6y ago
We are using Flutter at our company and it's far from a black box if you get stuck. For example, try going to a TextField widget and use go-to-definition view the source source code. You can go very far down the go-to-definition hole. Even to the point where you can see where the blinking cursor is being rendered. For several "blockers" we did have, we were able to copy/paste the Flutter implementations, rename them, and modify them to fit our own needs.
dshpala 6y ago
Hmm, LiveData is pretty straightforward class, over the years I think I memorized its implementation. I'm curious what's the issue is?
- ignoramous 6y ago
  The bug is, on ocassion, while executing a query, LiveData would hit EACCESS trying to open the table (?): https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/170228126 https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/170228126 It had to do with their Invalidation tracker (a table, I believe, which is a living log of ordered updates that need to be delivered to observers).

bkm 6y ago

Relevant: https://www.reddit.com/r/FlutterDev/comments/jwmepu/very_poor_performance_of_new_google_pay_app/ https://www.reddit.com/r/FlutterDev/comments/jwmepu/very_poo... https://thomasmiddel.medium.com/flutter-its-poor-ios-performance-84ec1eacd235 https://thomasmiddel.medium.com/flutter-its-poor-ios-perform...

rubicon33 6y ago

Flutter used to be such a great experience, but something happened ~6 months ago that totally derailed it. It brings my late 2016 MBP to a crawl if I am building on iOS simulator. After reading online about it being related to Metal, and needing to switch flutter channels, trying that, and still seeing no success... I just gave up on Flutter (for now). Maybe Flutter 2 has resolved this?

eseidelGoogle 6y ago
[Flutter Eng. Dir here] I would love to learn more about your experience. Would you be willing to file an issue and either post it here or CC me on it? flutter.dev/support
- rubicon33 6y ago
  This closed issue from 2018 appears to be the same issue I was experiencing in ~mid 2020. FWIW, I was also using Rive animations in my app. https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/21445 https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/21445

ROARosen 6y ago

> We've been working with the GPay team the last couple months and have made significant improvements within both Flutter and the GPay app So seriously, how can you reassure any indie dev not getting VIP support to optimize their app for laggyness, that they can easily produce a decently performant app?

Hixie 6y ago
Many of the lessons we learn with GPay directly fed into improvements in the framework, improvements in our tooling to make this kind of debugging much easier, and better documentation to try to scale the knowledge to the whole community. Some of these have already shipped (see e.g. new features in our DevTools) and much more will continue to deploy over the coming months.

ywei3410 6y ago

Hi, Could you elaborate on some types of applications which wouldn't or would be a good fit for Flutter at the moment? There's a lot of comments and links to applications both working and non-working; but I don't really have a good gauge as to what works and doesn't.

dmitriid 6y ago

The ad: > Google Pay switched to Flutter a few months ago for their flagship mobile app, and they already achieved major gains in productivity and quality. And then, the reality: > We were also not satisfied with the performance of the initial GPay release. Ah, the classic false advertisement. Let me re-write the ad for you: > Thanks to several-months-long involvement of Flutter's development we could finally fix some of the issues plaguing our app that we re-wrote in Flutter. We're still not close to the release, and we only hope it will be better.