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I use Flutter every day...your team needs to be more transparent. Tangible answers and numbers, "Happy developers are a prerequisite for a wide variety of other

I use Flutter every day...your team needs to be more transparent. Tangible answers and numbers, "Happy developers are a prerequisite for a wide variety of other Google APIs and services", is great, but those services and APIs have a variety of other entry points not using Flutter, they don't depend on it. How is Flutter funded? It was said a few years ago the budget came from internal projects like ads, fuchsia, pay, and stadia, does stadia being killed effect the Flutter budget? There was an implication at that time that if they all died or left Flutter then it would be killed via budget cuts, is that true? Why is Flutter not being adopted by Google for more outward facing apps? Is it seen internally as at risk of abandonment? "600,000 apps in the Play Store alone", how many of these are commercial vs hobby projects, does Google really care about these if enterprise adoption is minimal? Delving into game dev when iOS is not polished seemed like a decision made because there was a need to show potential value via expansion upward in the org, I was concerned this was a hail mary when announced, and with Stadia now gone the timing seems more suspect. "It has a developer base of several million", how many of these are again hobby users, how many use it weekly / monthly? Flutter has a large DevRel push, how many of these projects / users are students who just spin it up once and hit star on GH when asked and never touch it again? Your team was asked approximately this question by a MSFT employee looking at publishing info on cross platform framework adoption vs native and could not get a straight answer I was told. Multiple Flutter related posts by agencies and evangelists point to a google trends page or GH stars saying Flutter is blowing up in popularity compared to other frameworks, but when you start looking at core packages searched for and starred for each framework the Flutter trend reverses, is this because the words Flutter and Dart are too common and in actuality the popularity is not what is being projected in trends? Is this because DevRels directly ask people to star the core project? I ask Flutter GDE's these questions and they come off like they can't be trusted to be honest on these topics for fear of losing status. I have also heard a certain outspoken Flutter GDE mention on stream other frameworks have much larger communities, how can this jive with these purported trends? It seems as though the community size and growth of Flutter is projected to be greater than it is, that's subjectively how it feels as a dev as well I will note as someone who is using packages / repos, and that is worrisome. I worry that the first time we hear solid numbers will be in a blog post about the Flutter project ending with an explanation that low enterprise adoption and direct or indirect revenue could not support the scale of this ambitious a project. It would be great to hear some hard facts that give people confidence in adoption and that Flutter has long term backing higher in the company. If this is not the case, honesty would be nice as well. @a14n seems to have tailed off on his work on Flutter quite a bit, which worries me if he is the core example of users who would pick this up in an OSS abandonment situation. Even now it feels as though if major OSS package maintainers like Remi Rousselet walked away the community would be hit hard. I can't imagine the project continuing without Google, especially with Dart needing the same treatment if Flutter was killed. Dart issues with notes saying the team lacks bandwidth exist now, I just can't see it working even with some other companies interested, Flutter/Dart need full enterprise backing at this stage. "which is using the new engine on iOS" - An aside... I downloaded the app, it seems pretty smooth, not sure the FPS but I saw minimal jank which is great. BUT, it still has the biggest complaint I hear about Flutter apps on iOS, feel. On iOS is does not feel native, the scrolling and gestures feel off. This is part of what I was referring to regarding ignoring polish on iOS in favor of expansion earlier, iOS still feels second class on Flutter. I have watched a friend delete a flutter app from their phone right after installing with the reasoning "I hate when apps feel like that, it's so obnoxious", these people exist, they feel Flutter apps are second class, this sentiment will 100% drive away enterprise adoption imho. Even recently a user on the flutterdev subreddit said they were leaving Flutter behind just do to this persistent user feedback. My final thought is the same as my first, be more transparent, show the community with tangible honest numbers and backing Flutter is not in jeopardy, otherwise the track record (and imho vague mushy pumped up stats) makes it appear it is.

Hixie 4y ago
Hello, Flutter TL here. > your team needs to be more transparent. Unfortunately most of the lack of transparency is not under the Flutter team's control, but I'll see what I can do. > How is Flutter funded? A number of companies (Google, Bytedance, and Canonical are three that I know have publicly stated so; there are others but it's up to them to make such statements) employ people to work on Flutter. Hardware costs (CI, source control, bug database, etc) are paid for by Google and Microsoft. These companies don't typically share more detailed information about how they account for this funding or how much they pay exactly; it's considered proprietary, and often there are legal implications to making detailed statements about this kind of thing. > It was said a few years ago the budget came from internal projects like ads, fuchsia, pay, and stadia (I'm assuming you are referring to Google's portion of the funding.) That's not really how Google accounts for things internally. Broadly speaking, the more usage (internal and external) that a product gets, and the more revenue can be assigned to a product, the more Google is likely to fund it. In the case of Flutter, Google is apparently quite happy and has been increasing funding over time as a result, as have other companies (as you can tell by looking at the number of people employed to work on it). > does stadia being killed effect the Flutter budget? No, that's not how things work at Google. (I assume you mean Google's investment in Flutter when you say "Flutter budget". Flutter itself, as an open source project, doesn't have a budget currently. Maybe one day we'll have a foundation but right now the additional management overhead doesn't seem worth it.) > There was an implication at that time that if they all died or left Flutter then it would be killed via budget cuts, is that true? I think when there were far fewer apps using Flutter, and fewer other companies using and contributing to Flutter, that if Google had stopped using it internally, after a while, it would have become difficult to justify continued investment (since in that scenario, very few people are using it at all, so what's in it for Google? Google isn't a charity). However, at this point Flutter is used a great deal outside Google, as Tim discusses in his comment above, and even if Google itself were to stop using it (which seems highly unlikely) there would still be plenty of justification to continue funding it as a developer product (many of Google's APIs and developer products aren't used internally at all). That said, this is not intended to be a forward-looking statement (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forward-looking_statement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forward-looking_statement). If you want to ask Google about its future funding plans I suspect the best place to do so is a stockholders conference call. > Why is Flutter not being adopted by Google for more outward facing apps? With some exceptions that involve negotiations with the relevant teams, Google doesn't generally talk about what technologies it uses for its own applications. Tim listed quite a few apps whose teams have agreed to publicly state they use Flutter, though. I'm not sure what else to tell you. It's not like Google is making new apps all the time, and rewriting an app in Flutter only makes sense if the app's team benefits from the rewrite in some way. > Is it seen internally as at risk of abandonment? No. (But then, why would you take my word for it.) > "600,000 apps in the Play Store alone", how many of these are commercial vs hobby projects I don't think this is an axis along which apps are categorized, so I've no idea how to answer that. (What is a "hobby project"? Does it count as commercial if someone charges for their hobby?) > does Google really care about these if enterprise adoption is minimal? Yes? We care about all apps. > Delving into game dev when iOS is not polished seemed like a decision made because there was a need to show potential value via expansion upward in the org, I was concerned this was a hail mary when announced, and with Stadia now gone the timing seems more suspect. I'm not sure what you're suggesting here. Our work on iOS is entirely orthogonal to the work on the Casual Games Toolkit, it's not like the people who worked on one could work on the other. The Casual Games Toolkit is intended to help people who are interested in writing games with Flutter but don't know where to start; we regularly do surveys of our developer base and this was an area that people indicated an interest in. I'm not really sure what the supposed link to Stadia would even be. Work on iOS continues, and we have significantly grown the team there in the past year. > "It has a developer base of several million", how many of these are again hobby users We occasionally post the data from our quarterly surveys to our blog on Medium, the latest post I could find that separates the data by "what is your primary purpose" was the Q3 2021 survey's report and it had this graph: https://miro.medium.com/max/1400/0*_GNHkk5TLOI7wQYc https://miro.medium.com/max/1400/0*_GNHkk5TLOI7wQYc Looks like it's <50% are "hobby" users and the number is shrinking. That said, we explicitly want to be a project that people use to learn programming, providing a seamless path from "learning" to "hobby" to "professional" so I would hope this number never gets very low. > how many use it weekly / monthly? That's very hard to say for a variety of reasons (e.g. many people turn off analytics, analytics are extremely unreliable in general, many people use Flutter via means that wouldn't trigger our analytics in the first place, etc) but my understanding is that as best we can tell, Flutter has well over 500,000 MAUs. I don't think we track weekly numbers. [continued below]

Hixie 4y ago

Hello, Flutter TL here. > your team needs to be more transparent. Unfortunately most of the lack of transparency is not under the Flutter team's control, but I'll see what I can do. > How is Flutter funded? A number of companies (Google, Bytedance, and Canonical are three that I know have publicly stated so; there are others but it's up to them to make such statements) employ people to work on Flutter. Hardware costs (CI, source control, bug database, etc) are paid for by Google and Microsoft. These companies don't typically share more detailed information about how they account for this funding or how much they pay exactly; it's considered proprietary, and often there are legal implications to making detailed statements about this kind of thing. > It was said a few years ago the budget came from internal projects like ads, fuchsia, pay, and stadia (I'm assuming you are referring to Google's portion of the funding.) That's not really how Google accounts for things internally. Broadly speaking, the more usage (internal and external) that a product gets, and the more revenue can be assigned to a product, the more Google is likely to fund it. In the case of Flutter, Google is apparently quite happy and has been increasing funding over time as a result, as have other companies (as you can tell by looking at the number of people employed to work on it). > does stadia being killed effect the Flutter budget? No, that's not how things work at Google. (I assume you mean Google's investment in Flutter when you say "Flutter budget". Flutter itself, as an open source project, doesn't have a budget currently. Maybe one day we'll have a foundation but right now the additional management overhead doesn't seem worth it.) > There was an implication at that time that if they all died or left Flutter then it would be killed via budget cuts, is that true? I think when there were far fewer apps using Flutter, and fewer other companies using and contributing to Flutter, that if Google had stopped using it internally, after a while, it would have become difficult to justify continued investment (since in that scenario, very few people are using it at all, so what's in it for Google? Google isn't a charity). However, at this point Flutter is used a great deal outside Google, as Tim discusses in his comment above, and even if Google itself were to stop using it (which seems highly unlikely) there would still be plenty of justification to continue funding it as a developer product (many of Google's APIs and developer products aren't used internally at all). That said, this is not intended to be a forward-looking statement (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forward-looking_statement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forward-looking_statement). If you want to ask Google about its future funding plans I suspect the best place to do so is a stockholders conference call. > Why is Flutter not being adopted by Google for more outward facing apps? With some exceptions that involve negotiations with the relevant teams, Google doesn't generally talk about what technologies it uses for its own applications. Tim listed quite a few apps whose teams have agreed to publicly state they use Flutter, though. I'm not sure what else to tell you. It's not like Google is making new apps all the time, and rewriting an app in Flutter only makes sense if the app's team benefits from the rewrite in some way. > Is it seen internally as at risk of abandonment? No. (But then, why would you take my word for it.) > "600,000 apps in the Play Store alone", how many of these are commercial vs hobby projects I don't think this is an axis along which apps are categorized, so I've no idea how to answer that. (What is a "hobby project"? Does it count as commercial if someone charges for their hobby?) > does Google really care about these if enterprise adoption is minimal? Yes? We care about all apps. > Delving into game dev when iOS is not polished seemed like a decision made because there was a need to show potential value via expansion upward in the org, I was concerned this was a hail mary when announced, and with Stadia now gone the timing seems more suspect. I'm not sure what you're suggesting here. Our work on iOS is entirely orthogonal to the work on the Casual Games Toolkit, it's not like the people who worked on one could work on the other. The Casual Games Toolkit is intended to help people who are interested in writing games with Flutter but don't know where to start; we regularly do surveys of our developer base and this was an area that people indicated an interest in. I'm not really sure what the supposed link to Stadia would even be. Work on iOS continues, and we have significantly grown the team there in the past year. > "It has a developer base of several million", how many of these are again hobby users We occasionally post the data from our quarterly surveys to our blog on Medium, the latest post I could find that separates the data by "what is your primary purpose" was the Q3 2021 survey's report and it had this graph: https://miro.medium.com/max/1400/0*_GNHkk5TLOI7wQYc https://miro.medium.com/max/1400/0*_GNHkk5TLOI7wQYc Looks like it's <50% are "hobby" users and the number is shrinking. That said, we explicitly want to be a project that people use to learn programming, providing a seamless path from "learning" to "hobby" to "professional" so I would hope this number never gets very low. > how many use it weekly / monthly? That's very hard to say for a variety of reasons (e.g. many people turn off analytics, analytics are extremely unreliable in general, many people use Flutter via means that wouldn't trigger our analytics in the first place, etc) but my understanding is that as best we can tell, Flutter has well over 500,000 MAUs. I don't think we track weekly numbers. [continued below]