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Has there been any consideration of possibly spinning the Flutter project out of Google and into a non-profit foundation? I think right now the biggest thing h

by _mlbt 3y ago

Has there been any consideration of possibly spinning the Flutter project out of Google and into a non-profit foundation? I think right now the biggest thing holding Flutter back isn’t technological, but rather the stigma that is attached to Google’s history of abandoning products. I understand that it is in widespread use in important products from Google and other major companies, but nearly every time Flutter comes up both here and on Reddit a significant number of comments are concerns about Google’s long-term commitment.

lxgr 3y ago
> I think right now the biggest thing holding Flutter back isn’t technological, but rather the stigma that is attached to Google’s history of abandoning products. No, as a user of some Flutter apps I also find them incredibly janky and wouldn't want to see the technology adopted (in this state!) even if it wasn't made by Google. As nice as it might be to app developers, why should I pay for that with noticeable worse performance? How do you even make a brand new iPhone Pro drop frames when scrolling!? Other than that, as far as I can tell it reimplements the entire UI rendering stack for web apps (there seems to be an optional HTML backend, but rendering to a canvas seems to be the default). As somebody never having used it... why? Doesn't this break all accessibility and native UI compatibility that browsers are providing out of the box?
- mdhb 3y ago
  I think your Flutter knowledge is really very out of date. They rewrote a rendering engine from the ground up and released it about a year ago and a lot of the problems you describe are no longer the case.
  - msoad 3y ago
    Any iPhone App that I can try to see how the performance is these days? I remember Google Wallet app was horrible performance wise about two years ago
    - msoad 3y ago
      Just tried Google Classroom on my iPhone Pro and animations are indeed choppy and scrolling feels weird
      - fngjdflmdflg 3y ago
        Without knowing what Flutter version Classroom was using before impeller was released and how active development is on Classroom at google its hard to say if they could easily upgrade to the latest version. Flutter has had a lot of breaking changes leading up to the impeller release so it's hard to say if they actually upgraded to the newest version although yeah it is bad that they haven't done it by now if they didn't and if they did upgrade to impeller and it's still slow that's also bad.
    - cbracken 3y ago
      Wonderous is an app we've pointed people to in the past. I believe the current iOS release on the App Store uses the newer Impeller rendering engine instead of Skia, but I could be wrong. App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/wonderous/id1612491897 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/wonderous/id1612491897 Code: https://github.com/gskinnerTeam/flutter-wonderous-app https://github.com/gskinnerTeam/flutter-wonderous-app (Disclaimer: I work on Flutter)
      - lxgr 3y ago
        This indeed runs much smoother than most Flutter apps I've used in the past! If it was indeed all just due to the slow rendering engine, hopefully this will sift down to other apps. In the end I really don't care what framework a mobile app is developed with, as long as apps don't feel janky and/or out of place as far as platform UI conventions are concerned. In that sense, me not noticing that an app is using Flutter, React Native, maybe even webviews etc. is probably the ideal :) But my experience as a user of apps leveraging technologies like this has often shown that reinventing so many layers of the UI rendering stack inevitably leads to some form of "weirdness". Sometimes that's ok; sometimes the alternative would be even weirder, badly developed and maintained native apps. But I can't say I've ever loved using such an app for, and not despite, not being a native app. The React Native approach just seems like a better level to try platform abstraction at. On the web, I still can't help but find "rendering text and UI elements to a canvas" incredibly weird. I could see that approach working for games, but for things that might as well be regular old web applications, there are just so many things that can go wrong... (Reader mode and password autofill come to mind, for example.)
- satvikpendem 3y ago
  Why, because I can make an app that works on all platforms, seamlessly, and the apps on each platform do in fact have accessibility support. As the other commenter said, they have improved performance to a considerable degree. It's an alternative to React Native, not necessarily native development, and it's a great platform for such use cases.
eseidel 3y ago
My understanding is there has been a lot of discussion about this. It's not something I'm actively pushing for. One of the things I'm excited for with Shorebird is creating an economic entity whose purpose is moving Flutter forward. We're pretty early in our journey, but I would love to see us grow to be "the flutter company" over time. I think it's still a little early to try and spin Flutter out as a non-profit, but I suspect as more companies contribute to Flutter something like that will happen.
saghm 3y ago
I agree that this is a common concern with Google products, but I can't help but wonder if spinning Flutter out of Google would just end up being a vindication of those concerns rather than mitigation. If tomorrow Google came out and said that Flutter was being moved from Google ownership into a non-profit, I'm struggling to imagine that the community response would be "oh good, this shows that Google has a long-term commitment to Flutter" rather than people more cynically viewing it as yet another instance of Google shutting down a product, just with an attempt to avoid the PR repercussions. If Google really does care about it in the long term, I'm not really sure there's any way to win the debate about their stewardship, so they might as well just keep their heads down and focus on continuing work on it, and maybe someday if they do that long enough they might be able to win some trust back.
- pas 3y ago
  it's a hard problem, because when Google cares it might not be good for users of the various projects/tools/languages. these projects has specific goals (that serve Google's high-level goals in various ways) and circumstances (which many times lead to significantly different engineering trade-offs). Google starts projects with a lot of initial investment (new language/compiler/toolset/SDK/std-lib/frontend-component-library), but then their boldness almost disappears, and it takes a lot of time for them to finally catch-up, and on top of that they usually take a long time to "care" about things important for users (non-google developers). for their care/support/long-term-commitment to matter, first they (would) need to position themselves as downstream users of Flutter, and for that they first need to transform leadership into a community-driven something.

by _mlbt 3y ago

lxgr 3y ago

> I think right now the biggest thing holding Flutter back isn’t technological, but rather the stigma that is attached to Google’s history of abandoning products. No, as a user of some Flutter apps I also find them incredibly janky and wouldn't want to see the technology adopted (in this state!) even if it wasn't made by Google. As nice as it might be to app developers, why should I pay for that with noticeable worse performance? How do you even make a brand new iPhone Pro drop frames when scrolling!? Other than that, as far as I can tell it reimplements the entire UI rendering stack for web apps (there seems to be an optional HTML backend, but rendering to a canvas seems to be the default). As somebody never having used it... why? Doesn't this break all accessibility and native UI compatibility that browsers are providing out of the box?

mdhb 3y ago
I think your Flutter knowledge is really very out of date. They rewrote a rendering engine from the ground up and released it about a year ago and a lot of the problems you describe are no longer the case.
- msoad 3y ago
  Any iPhone App that I can try to see how the performance is these days? I remember Google Wallet app was horrible performance wise about two years ago
  - msoad 3y ago
    Just tried Google Classroom on my iPhone Pro and animations are indeed choppy and scrolling feels weird
    - fngjdflmdflg 3y ago
      Without knowing what Flutter version Classroom was using before impeller was released and how active development is on Classroom at google its hard to say if they could easily upgrade to the latest version. Flutter has had a lot of breaking changes leading up to the impeller release so it's hard to say if they actually upgraded to the newest version although yeah it is bad that they haven't done it by now if they didn't and if they did upgrade to impeller and it's still slow that's also bad.
  - cbracken 3y ago
    Wonderous is an app we've pointed people to in the past. I believe the current iOS release on the App Store uses the newer Impeller rendering engine instead of Skia, but I could be wrong. App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/wonderous/id1612491897 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/wonderous/id1612491897 Code: https://github.com/gskinnerTeam/flutter-wonderous-app https://github.com/gskinnerTeam/flutter-wonderous-app (Disclaimer: I work on Flutter)
    - lxgr 3y ago
      This indeed runs much smoother than most Flutter apps I've used in the past! If it was indeed all just due to the slow rendering engine, hopefully this will sift down to other apps. In the end I really don't care what framework a mobile app is developed with, as long as apps don't feel janky and/or out of place as far as platform UI conventions are concerned. In that sense, me not noticing that an app is using Flutter, React Native, maybe even webviews etc. is probably the ideal :) But my experience as a user of apps leveraging technologies like this has often shown that reinventing so many layers of the UI rendering stack inevitably leads to some form of "weirdness". Sometimes that's ok; sometimes the alternative would be even weirder, badly developed and maintained native apps. But I can't say I've ever loved using such an app for, and not despite, not being a native app. The React Native approach just seems like a better level to try platform abstraction at. On the web, I still can't help but find "rendering text and UI elements to a canvas" incredibly weird. I could see that approach working for games, but for things that might as well be regular old web applications, there are just so many things that can go wrong... (Reader mode and password autofill come to mind, for example.)
satvikpendem 3y ago
Why, because I can make an app that works on all platforms, seamlessly, and the apps on each platform do in fact have accessibility support. As the other commenter said, they have improved performance to a considerable degree. It's an alternative to React Native, not necessarily native development, and it's a great platform for such use cases.

eseidel 3y ago

My understanding is there has been a lot of discussion about this. It's not something I'm actively pushing for. One of the things I'm excited for with Shorebird is creating an economic entity whose purpose is moving Flutter forward. We're pretty early in our journey, but I would love to see us grow to be "the flutter company" over time. I think it's still a little early to try and spin Flutter out as a non-profit, but I suspect as more companies contribute to Flutter something like that will happen.

saghm 3y ago

I agree that this is a common concern with Google products, but I can't help but wonder if spinning Flutter out of Google would just end up being a vindication of those concerns rather than mitigation. If tomorrow Google came out and said that Flutter was being moved from Google ownership into a non-profit, I'm struggling to imagine that the community response would be "oh good, this shows that Google has a long-term commitment to Flutter" rather than people more cynically viewing it as yet another instance of Google shutting down a product, just with an attempt to avoid the PR repercussions. If Google really does care about it in the long term, I'm not really sure there's any way to win the debate about their stewardship, so they might as well just keep their heads down and focus on continuing work on it, and maybe someday if they do that long enough they might be able to win some trust back.

pas 3y ago
it's a hard problem, because when Google cares it might not be good for users of the various projects/tools/languages. these projects has specific goals (that serve Google's high-level goals in various ways) and circumstances (which many times lead to significantly different engineering trade-offs). Google starts projects with a lot of initial investment (new language/compiler/toolset/SDK/std-lib/frontend-component-library), but then their boldness almost disappears, and it takes a lot of time for them to finally catch-up, and on top of that they usually take a long time to "care" about things important for users (non-google developers). for their care/support/long-term-commitment to matter, first they (would) need to position themselves as downstream users of Flutter, and for that they first need to transform leadership into a community-driven something.