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This is keeping me from looking seriously at Flutter tbh. Go is safe, it has a community and ecosystem outside of Google, Flutter doesn't seem to be there yet.

wpietri 4y ago
Yeah, I tried Flutter for a project and there was a lot to like about it. But it's very much a Google project. On the one hand, that's great, as they've been able to do a lot of interesting stuff. But Google is just so fickle that I'd hate to bet that they'll keep going with it.
- Apocryphon 4y ago
  It's open-source, at least. It seems to be popular enough in Asia that if Google abandoned it that Alibaba or someone might be interested enough to pick it up. https://twitter.com/taodong/status/1141603862740008960 https://twitter.com/taodong/status/1141603862740008960 (thread) Canonical saying Flutter is the future of Ubuntu desktop apps is something too, but I'm not sure how much it's caught on since when it was announced in July 2020. https://canonical.com/blog/flutter-and-ubuntu-so-far https://canonical.com/blog/flutter-and-ubuntu-so-far
  - phillipcarter 4y ago
    The wonderful thing about making everything OSS, and also why execs hate it, is it gives up a degree of control to kill something at a moment's notice. And so Dart/Flutter are in a good place!
    - busterarm 4y ago
      It's an important point to understand that it's not the flexibility to kill it but the flexibility to divert its resources elsewhere. You lose that with OSS projects because you eventually end up with people screaming down your door and the visibility that brings. Also being assigned to work on these projects internally is career death. Both of these problems happened to Google Cloud's Terraform provider at some point and it was a headache for the company and the community. Luckily Terraform adoption is out of Google's hands. They're just forced to play ball. OTOH, Google could easily kill off Flutter via other means.
  - Illniyar 4y ago
    Flutter is basically a custom rendering engine with massive effort to create pixel perfect compatability with native offerings. If google drops the ball on it, I doubt there is any company that can take on maintaining something like that. If google drops support for flutter, the next design update by ios or android would kill it.
collegeburner 4y ago
i can confirm that this kept at least a few teams i've talked to or worked with from choosing flutter. facebook and react native are viewed as much safer from the "killed by google" effect. same thing tossing around the idea of using carbon, their new language.
sirius87 4y ago
100% this. I don't know if this is a PR problem, but it very much feels like Flutter is a project that will live and die by Google's sword. Go doesn't come with this perception. Projects that make it big from within Google need to find shelter from this perception by moving into community driven project governance, for better or worse.
mosburger 4y ago
I feel like it might be a little "safer" if it wasn't tied to Dart. :-/
- rjh29 4y ago
  Dart is pretty much 'done' as a language though. They are adding code generation and other nice things, but it's stable. Flutter on the other hand needs to be kept up to date as Android and iOS change, so it's very vulnerable.
  - SahAssar 4y ago
    What is an example of a mainstream language being "done" before?
    - detaro 4y ago
      Most mainstream languages are "done" in the way that matters here. Not "done" in the sense of "not receiving new features anymore", but in the sense that you could switch their implementations to maintenance mode today and they'd remain useful for a long time. Easily visible with languages where people do indeed keep using old versions for whatever reason.
    - tazjin 4y ago
      Common Lisp
preommr 4y ago
Go projects are also usually biased towards being very simple with few dependencies. A lot of projects that are well suited for go would be easy to rewrite to another language if Google did ever decide to abandon it.
rjh29 4y ago
I am using Flutter and have the same concerns. There are many companies that use Flutter, but Google do 99% of the development and don't seem to be using it for any of their own public apps, which is discouraging.
- tsbertalan 4y ago
  Well, they did a Big Damn Rewrite to use it for Wallet/Pay, and, in the process, dropped a bunch of features and made it infuriatingly tied to a phone number, because the rewrite was really for the Indian market.
  - nhannah 4y ago
    My understanding is only Pay in the US and India are the Flutter version, Wallet is not using Flutter. This also had the Flutter boat shaking on reddit a bit back.
  - rjh29 4y ago
    They actually wrote the newest Wallet app without Flutter, so it's a step backwards there.
yesimahuman 4y ago
Not to mention that it seems that the relationship between Flutter and the Android team is contentious at best
root_axis 4y ago
Yes, and even worse, the nature of Flutter means its utility is especially vulnerable to abandonment. If Go were abandoned you could at least maintain your Go applications indefinitely, but since Flutter relies on its own UI engine it requires perpetual development to stay in sync with the evolving UI design language of iOS and Android.
- megaman821 4y ago
  It's even worse than that. Not only is keeping the UI updated a herculean task. It is written in a programming language (Dart) that virtually nobody outside of Google uses. Other than another giant tech company, no one could keep Flutter going if Google ever drops it.
  - Apocryphon 4y ago
    Dart is a really simple and ergonomic language to pick up, and there are all sorts of hobbyist languages and frameworks that have niche developer interest. It doesn't have to replace anything major to survive.
    - SahAssar 4y ago
      > Dart is a really simple and ergonomic language to pick up Are there any major projects besides flutter built on dart? The fear is not that dart is hard to use, it's that it would not be maintained if flutter was not a mainstream success.
      - johnnyanmac 4y ago
        A quick browse shows a few notable names like Square, Tizen, and Toyota. Amazon seems to have also forked Flutter themselves to make their own framework so expand Flutter to Desktop and Web: https://docs.amplify.aws/ https://docs.amplify.aws/ Seems to be enough buzz around it that I wouldn't be super worried.
tommy92 4y ago
I started learning dart/flutter a few days ago. Now I'm having second thoughts.
timsneath 4y ago
(Disclosure: I lead PM/UX for Flutter & Dart.) For sure, anything that I could say along the lines of "we're not shutting Flutter down" might be taken as having overtones of the Baghdad Bob meme. And indeed, why should you trust my word? The reason you should feel confident to use Flutter is because it's strongly in our business interest to invest in it. Over 600,000 apps in the Play Store alone are already written using Flutter, to say nothing of the countless apps for iOS, Windows, macOS, Linux and web. The list includes big brands like Alibaba, BMW, eBay, and SHEIN. Neither Google as a whole, nor Android in particular would be better off if Flutter didn't continue to flourish. Aside from that, there are thousands of engineers at Google who use Dart and Flutter internally to build a wide variety of apps. There are many millions of lines of code written that power everything from Ads to our internal CRM system. Google wouldn't be better off if we had to throw all that code away and start over. Lastly, Flutter is very successful. It has a developer base of several million, is growing quickly, and developers tell us it makes them more productive (https://medium.com/flutter/does-flutter-boost-developer-productivity-475f713724b3 https://medium.com/flutter/does-flutter-boost-developer-prod...). Happy developers are a prerequisite for a wide variety of other Google APIs and services, so we have a vested interest in continuing that. Even if it weren't for Google, there are more contributors to Flutter from outside Google than there are Flutter team employees. Those contributors include big companies like Samsung, Canonical and Sony, as well as prolific individual developers like @a14n (https://github.com/a14n https://github.com/a14n). We're working hard on lots of fun new stuff right now, including a rewrite of our graphics rendering engine. If you haven't seen it, check out https://wonderous.app https://wonderous.app, which is using the new engine on iOS. We think it shows the potential of Flutter well!
- fatherOfLegends 4y ago
  Thanks Tim, I appreciate you calling out these things but I feel it would make a bigger impression to elaborate on how much the Flutter community supports the development of Flutter. People are afraid of losing Google's support because they assume that without Google's contribution the framework would not continue to grow. Firebase is a google product (not an OS framework) that Google could kill off and no one could do anything about it. It they decided to shut it down every app depending on it would go down the day day they turned it off.I don't see people being equally concerned about using Firebase because Google could kill it. It makes sense to use it because it is cheaper and faster to get started than creating your own backend and all of the related services. If they did shut it down people expect to get enough lead time to transition to something else. Using Flutter is less risky than depending on any Google service. Additionally Flutter development is faster and requires fewer engineers for the same output. Flutter code is more testable and reliable than any other option that runs on the same platforms. Flutter does not require QA teams or additional quality engineers when you leverage its full testability. Flutter runs on everything, if suddenly Oracle won a lawsuit and manufacturers stopped making Android devices Flutter would run on the next mobile OS, or the next anything OS. Regardless of what Google does in the future Flutter is the safest bet a startup can make and it is the smartest bet a mature company can make. The gains you will make in the meantime using Flutter outweigh the risks.

wpietri 4y ago

Yeah, I tried Flutter for a project and there was a lot to like about it. But it's very much a Google project. On the one hand, that's great, as they've been able to do a lot of interesting stuff. But Google is just so fickle that I'd hate to bet that they'll keep going with it.

Apocryphon 4y ago
It's open-source, at least. It seems to be popular enough in Asia that if Google abandoned it that Alibaba or someone might be interested enough to pick it up. https://twitter.com/taodong/status/1141603862740008960 https://twitter.com/taodong/status/1141603862740008960 (thread) Canonical saying Flutter is the future of Ubuntu desktop apps is something too, but I'm not sure how much it's caught on since when it was announced in July 2020. https://canonical.com/blog/flutter-and-ubuntu-so-far https://canonical.com/blog/flutter-and-ubuntu-so-far
- phillipcarter 4y ago
  The wonderful thing about making everything OSS, and also why execs hate it, is it gives up a degree of control to kill something at a moment's notice. And so Dart/Flutter are in a good place!
  - busterarm 4y ago
    It's an important point to understand that it's not the flexibility to kill it but the flexibility to divert its resources elsewhere. You lose that with OSS projects because you eventually end up with people screaming down your door and the visibility that brings. Also being assigned to work on these projects internally is career death. Both of these problems happened to Google Cloud's Terraform provider at some point and it was a headache for the company and the community. Luckily Terraform adoption is out of Google's hands. They're just forced to play ball. OTOH, Google could easily kill off Flutter via other means.
- Illniyar 4y ago
  Flutter is basically a custom rendering engine with massive effort to create pixel perfect compatability with native offerings. If google drops the ball on it, I doubt there is any company that can take on maintaining something like that. If google drops support for flutter, the next design update by ios or android would kill it.

collegeburner 4y ago

i can confirm that this kept at least a few teams i've talked to or worked with from choosing flutter. facebook and react native are viewed as much safer from the "killed by google" effect. same thing tossing around the idea of using carbon, their new language.

sirius87 4y ago

100% this. I don't know if this is a PR problem, but it very much feels like Flutter is a project that will live and die by Google's sword. Go doesn't come with this perception. Projects that make it big from within Google need to find shelter from this perception by moving into community driven project governance, for better or worse.

mosburger 4y ago

I feel like it might be a little "safer" if it wasn't tied to Dart. :-/

rjh29 4y ago
Dart is pretty much 'done' as a language though. They are adding code generation and other nice things, but it's stable. Flutter on the other hand needs to be kept up to date as Android and iOS change, so it's very vulnerable.
- SahAssar 4y ago
  What is an example of a mainstream language being "done" before?
  - detaro 4y ago
    Most mainstream languages are "done" in the way that matters here. Not "done" in the sense of "not receiving new features anymore", but in the sense that you could switch their implementations to maintenance mode today and they'd remain useful for a long time. Easily visible with languages where people do indeed keep using old versions for whatever reason.
  - tazjin 4y ago
    Common Lisp

preommr 4y ago

Go projects are also usually biased towards being very simple with few dependencies. A lot of projects that are well suited for go would be easy to rewrite to another language if Google did ever decide to abandon it.

rjh29 4y ago

I am using Flutter and have the same concerns. There are many companies that use Flutter, but Google do 99% of the development and don't seem to be using it for any of their own public apps, which is discouraging.

tsbertalan 4y ago
Well, they did a Big Damn Rewrite to use it for Wallet/Pay, and, in the process, dropped a bunch of features and made it infuriatingly tied to a phone number, because the rewrite was really for the Indian market.
- nhannah 4y ago
  My understanding is only Pay in the US and India are the Flutter version, Wallet is not using Flutter. This also had the Flutter boat shaking on reddit a bit back.
- rjh29 4y ago
  They actually wrote the newest Wallet app without Flutter, so it's a step backwards there.

yesimahuman 4y ago

Not to mention that it seems that the relationship between Flutter and the Android team is contentious at best

root_axis 4y ago

Yes, and even worse, the nature of Flutter means its utility is especially vulnerable to abandonment. If Go were abandoned you could at least maintain your Go applications indefinitely, but since Flutter relies on its own UI engine it requires perpetual development to stay in sync with the evolving UI design language of iOS and Android.

megaman821 4y ago
It's even worse than that. Not only is keeping the UI updated a herculean task. It is written in a programming language (Dart) that virtually nobody outside of Google uses. Other than another giant tech company, no one could keep Flutter going if Google ever drops it.
- Apocryphon 4y ago
  Dart is a really simple and ergonomic language to pick up, and there are all sorts of hobbyist languages and frameworks that have niche developer interest. It doesn't have to replace anything major to survive.
  - SahAssar 4y ago
    > Dart is a really simple and ergonomic language to pick up Are there any major projects besides flutter built on dart? The fear is not that dart is hard to use, it's that it would not be maintained if flutter was not a mainstream success.
    - johnnyanmac 4y ago
      A quick browse shows a few notable names like Square, Tizen, and Toyota. Amazon seems to have also forked Flutter themselves to make their own framework so expand Flutter to Desktop and Web: https://docs.amplify.aws/ https://docs.amplify.aws/ Seems to be enough buzz around it that I wouldn't be super worried.

tommy92 4y ago

I started learning dart/flutter a few days ago. Now I'm having second thoughts.

timsneath 4y ago

(Disclosure: I lead PM/UX for Flutter & Dart.) For sure, anything that I could say along the lines of "we're not shutting Flutter down" might be taken as having overtones of the Baghdad Bob meme. And indeed, why should you trust my word? The reason you should feel confident to use Flutter is because it's strongly in our business interest to invest in it. Over 600,000 apps in the Play Store alone are already written using Flutter, to say nothing of the countless apps for iOS, Windows, macOS, Linux and web. The list includes big brands like Alibaba, BMW, eBay, and SHEIN. Neither Google as a whole, nor Android in particular would be better off if Flutter didn't continue to flourish. Aside from that, there are thousands of engineers at Google who use Dart and Flutter internally to build a wide variety of apps. There are many millions of lines of code written that power everything from Ads to our internal CRM system. Google wouldn't be better off if we had to throw all that code away and start over. Lastly, Flutter is very successful. It has a developer base of several million, is growing quickly, and developers tell us it makes them more productive (https://medium.com/flutter/does-flutter-boost-developer-productivity-475f713724b3 https://medium.com/flutter/does-flutter-boost-developer-prod...). Happy developers are a prerequisite for a wide variety of other Google APIs and services, so we have a vested interest in continuing that. Even if it weren't for Google, there are more contributors to Flutter from outside Google than there are Flutter team employees. Those contributors include big companies like Samsung, Canonical and Sony, as well as prolific individual developers like @a14n (https://github.com/a14n https://github.com/a14n). We're working hard on lots of fun new stuff right now, including a rewrite of our graphics rendering engine. If you haven't seen it, check out https://wonderous.app https://wonderous.app, which is using the new engine on iOS. We think it shows the potential of Flutter well!

fatherOfLegends 4y ago
Thanks Tim, I appreciate you calling out these things but I feel it would make a bigger impression to elaborate on how much the Flutter community supports the development of Flutter. People are afraid of losing Google's support because they assume that without Google's contribution the framework would not continue to grow. Firebase is a google product (not an OS framework) that Google could kill off and no one could do anything about it. It they decided to shut it down every app depending on it would go down the day day they turned it off.I don't see people being equally concerned about using Firebase because Google could kill it. It makes sense to use it because it is cheaper and faster to get started than creating your own backend and all of the related services. If they did shut it down people expect to get enough lead time to transition to something else. Using Flutter is less risky than depending on any Google service. Additionally Flutter development is faster and requires fewer engineers for the same output. Flutter code is more testable and reliable than any other option that runs on the same platforms. Flutter does not require QA teams or additional quality engineers when you leverage its full testability. Flutter runs on everything, if suddenly Oracle won a lawsuit and manufacturers stopped making Android devices Flutter would run on the next mobile OS, or the next anything OS. Regardless of what Google does in the future Flutter is the safest bet a startup can make and it is the smartest bet a mature company can make. The gains you will make in the meantime using Flutter outweigh the risks.