8 ms·

Google layoffs hit Flutter team

122 points by busymom0 3y ago

bushbaba 3y ago
Not surprised. Flutter similar to many Google iniatives have no to minimal revenue tie in. This applies as well to grpc, bazel, beam, dart, fuschia, golang, gerrit. Personally I would not use any open source project that has less than 40% of the active contributions from non Google parties.
- alrs 3y ago
  I think Go is unique in this list in that the only other language that fills the same niche is Java, and Google can't afford to let the licensing whims of Oracle decide its fate. That said, I'm actively rooting for the demise of some of the others.
  - itsjzt 3y ago
    Kotlin is always an option and it also interpolates well with Java.
    - dinvlad 3y ago
      Kotlin is also at the whim of one company (JetBrains), unfortunately..
  - Ancalagon 3y ago
    Wow losing support for Golang is a scary thought I hadn’t considered until now.
    - dinvlad 3y ago
      I'm waiting nervously in anticipation.. But I wouldn't be surprised tbh
    - neonsunset 3y ago
      Another option is C#, it keeps getting active development, is the closest[0] in performance to pure unmanaged tier of languages and has tooling similar to Rust's cargo, isn't being abandoned any time soon (it's a core dependency of msft and seems to be increasing in amounts of promotion (finally!)), and has other industry players also working on it (like Unity). [0] https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/box-plot-summary-charts.html https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/...
    - eloisant 3y ago
      Golang is popular enough that development would continue even without Google. Could be a fork with a different name if needed, but it's not going anywhere. Too many companies are relying on it.
  - deleted 3y ago
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- deleted 3y ago
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- reindeerer 3y ago
  They are so entrenched on gerrit, it's so uniquely terrible. Should have bought Gitlab when there was the moment
  - NoahKAndrews 3y ago
    Gerrit's model is pretty interesting
ecshafer 3y ago
This is a shame that they are losing their jobs. But I can not be surprised at all. Flutter (and Dart) really just never seemed to have a reason to exist, and have not caught any traction.
- zinekeller 3y ago
  I personally think that the idea of Flutter has a potential in itself (see React Native), but bundling it with Dart makes it a non-starter.
  - RantyDave 3y ago
    I like Dart. I don't like the quantity of asynchrony I have to fight with to use it, but that's a "modern world" thing and there's little I can do about it. But picking up dart from a C++/Python/Objective-C/Javascript background was dead easy and even occasionally pleasant.
  - muzani 3y ago
    Dart was a good language and it applied what we learned about mobile app dev into a language suited for it. I always thought Java was a clumsy option for mobile dev. It seemed like a good move IMO. There are going to be people resistant to learning new things anyway, and those people would stick with RN (coming from JS/React) or native (coming from Java/native). Android later took a lot of the learnings from Dart and applied it there. I wouldn't say Flutter was a waste, it was just deprecated because there was little advantage over native Android.
    - krust 3y ago
      what about Kotlin?
- criticalfault 3y ago
  I think dart was meant to be used as a JavaScript alternative. Google was working on chrome with dart VM even... But as far as I remember it got abandoned due to pushback from the 'community' due to 'not wanting fragmentation'. Obviously by people who didn't want things changed. Web is the only place where we don't have an alternative and dart would be a great contender.
throwaway5959 3y ago
People have to stop building on Google software/apis. You’re just doing it to yourself at this point if you have any other alternative (obviously Android isn’t included in this).
- sattoshi 3y ago
  Which is probably part of the reason Flutter is getting shuttered. The Google brand is too unreliable to capture developer mindshare now.
  - karmakaze 3y ago
    But Flutter was the way out of all the fragmented historical legacy Android APIs and offers a cross-platform development experience.
  - nmfisher 3y ago
    Flutter isn't getting shuttered though? AFAICT these are company-wide layoffs that are affecting the Flutter team.
  - xen0 3y ago
    That the current team has just been mown by the latest swing of the scythe, doesn't mean the product is being killed. At least in some other cases, other teams are being spun up or being changed to take on these projects. Of course, that doesn't mean this isn't disruptive or unfortunate.
- iobug 3y ago
  In my team I have a policy to not depend on Google, apart from obviously, Android. Their KTLO on every product is absolute poo — will take an MS equivalent any day of the week.
  - htrp 3y ago
    I mean Microsoft Access is still around
- 3y ago
fakedang 3y ago
Serendipitous that just a few days back, I received an email stating that my unused Google Playstore Developer account was going to be shut down. I had only made and taken off one app some years back, and that was built with Flutter, the only mobile app framework that I know. Thankfully I don't make a career out of Flutter, unlike some really talented exceptional folks like Remi Rousselet and Marcin Szalek. Imo, Flutter was such an awesome refresh in mobile, but lost their way when they messed around with Web dev, which was entrenched React territory, with a very shoddy experience. After this announcement, I'll be 100% going with React for my side projects.
- krtirtho 3y ago
  How's that Flutter's fault? Google shutting down the PlayStore account isn't really related to it at all. And, I'm pretty sure nobody uses Flutter to write blogposts. It's usually used in highly rich/interective sites aka webapps like Rive, Google Earth etc. And it's technology and there is no boundary where innovation stops. It's not like React is the ultimate JS framework. Also, it's kind of Flutter's nature to adapt new platforms. So, I wouldn't say they lost their way. Because if my mobile app can run on Web without much tinkering, I'm signed up for it. So, I'm honestly kind of confused with your opinion.
  - fakedang 2y ago
    No, I'm not implying that it was the Google Playstore's fault. I just meant to say that Flutter was awesome when they were mobile focused, and that's the reason I started developing some apps. It's just coincidental that my account got shut down by Google for misuse, when Google shuts down the team building the app framework I used. No shade on Flutter at all (except flutter web, which is still kinda shit). I actually feel a bit sad that there will be no company left out there willing to pick up the slack. > Because if my mobile app can run on Web without much tinkering, I'm signed up for it. Except it won't. You'll suffer from poor SEO, poor rendering, poor performance, everything bad about Flutter. And all unnecessarily.
ein0p 3y ago
Python team too, per twitter.
gregors 3y ago
From the link it doesn't sound like Flutter was singled out specifically, but more of a cut & slash across several teams. Doesn't make it any better though.
infamouscow 3y ago
[flagged]
unsignednoop 3y ago
[dead]
ChrisArchitect 3y ago
Link should be the referenced/deep linked comment: https://www.reddit.com/r/FlutterDev/comments/1cduhra/more_layoffs_for_the_flutter_team/l1j9eoo/ https://www.reddit.com/r/FlutterDev/comments/1cduhra/more_la...
- pyb 3y ago
  Now I'm even more concerned for the future of Flutter.
1letterunixname 3y ago
Repeated layoffs: how to tell your other employees that you hate them and want them to leave also. These damn investors and MBB consultants put a bug in managements' ear that costs must be cut everywhere while mindlessly sabotaging core profit centers and essential infrastructure in myriad indirect ways.
brettkromkamp 3y ago
It doesn’t seem to me that Flutter was singled-out. Google is going through a phase of company-wide cuts (for example, a lot of people in their Python team have just been made redundant, as well). It also looks like there is a substantial amount of development (still) taking place in and around Flutter… think Impeller and WASM-support (to name but a few). On the whole, Flutter’s ecosystem seems to be, at least, reasonably healthy. All of this does not mean that Google won’t kill Flutter at some point. I just don’t think it will be now.
- ephemeral-life 3y ago
  Even if google kills flutter, I think the project has reached the point where it can live on without them. The framework and ecosystem has been around for years by now and in the time its been around, its been maintained by some seriously smart people. It can live on with a smaller team, new features will just take a little longer. Obviously its still sad when people get layed off though.
  - pzo 3y ago
    Google GWT and ecosystem is dead even though it was greatly popular - today nobody consider it to make a new app with that. Same with Facebook Parse - once Meta stopped supporting it most people don't use it even though it was open sourced and seems community still work on it - instead people use Firebase or Supabase. Flutter is more complex and more ambitious than GWT or Parse - it has currently 12k+ open issues, imagine how many developers you need to resolve all of those. Without Google support Flutter would be practically dead - no company would consider it for any serious new project and instead would go with React Native, PWA, unity, jetbrain compose multiplatform
    - Zigurd 3y ago
      I tried GWT years ago and it seemed clunky. It reminded me of Swing and SavaJe. Learning Flutter now, which seems vastly better. as you point out "more complex and more ambitious" but also seems much more ready for creating end-user-facing software.
firecall 3y ago
The Reddit thread is of a link to a Tweet... > https://twitter.com/leighajarett/status/1783848728878522620?t=gx4pLcWymgM0sFGFMqMJfA https://twitter.com/leighajarett/status/1783848728878522620?... With no solid information other than a to say "Some amazing #Flutter folks were impacted by the latest round of layoffs.". So that could be 3, 30 or 300 people. Who knows! Not defending Google, but to worry that Flutter is dead in the water is premature. But having said that... it's Google! Once bitten, and all that!
- rokkitmensch 3y ago
  One should definitely not worry that Flutter is drag in the water. One should draw a conclusion based on past performance (being the best predictor of future behavior) that Flutter will at some unknowable point in the future be dead in the water. Managing the risk of that impact to projects is of course each individual engineers business and responsibility.
lr1970 3y ago
Related discussion on HN [0] with 1000+ comments when Hixie was let go from google. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38381573 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38381573
- eseidel 3y ago
  Lol. Hixie quit. https://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1700627373&count=1 https://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1700627373&count=1
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
ohthatsnotright 3y ago
Good to see a $2T market cap company doesn't have enough revenue to retrain and reassign these employees. I'd hate to think what the shareholders would have to endure had they not done layoffs.
- m00x 3y ago
  Many Google layoffs were just teams shutting down and employees had 2-3 months to team match. Google hired way too much during pandemic. From what I hear from G friends, this is likely a low performer prune.
  - deleted 3y ago
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  - Ancalagon 3y ago
    This has been the message for all these layoffs - thousands of people. How many low performers did Google hire? Where's the accountability at the leadership level for this failure?
    - jbaczuk 3y ago
      Sure the leadership probably failed too, but don't the "performers" have any accountability?
      - zzzbra 3y ago
        if it's a percentage based cut then it's predetermined in a sense. leadership is just doing this as a blood sacrifice to the animal spirits of the market.
    - bloppe 3y ago
      If only 1% of Google employees are low performers, that's thousands of people.
      - 3y ago
hackergary 3y ago
reinventing native UI, good riddance I remember when it started, trolls were telling me how my React Native stack is bad and how active flutter's github is, how it was trending with stars. I'm like bro, having way more issues than stars isn't something to be proud of. LOL
- ZhadruOmjar 3y ago
  Are stars even relevant? How about we track downloads and production use cases. Takes zero effort to star.
krtirtho 3y ago
Tbh, there's no strong evidence supporting the claim ("killing flutter"). Also, google kind of has it's "layoff season". So, it usually affects almost all the teams at their headquarters. But, that doesn't mean killing Flutter. Flutter is actually backed by other companies as well. Not to mention Canonical the biggest one. Also, many Chinese companies uses it as well (biggest are Alibaba, Tencent etc). Google uses Flutter in big projects like The Google Earth, Play Console, GCP console, Ads for mobile etc. Also, Open Source contributors exists. Even if Google abandons Flutter, it'll be around for long time. Because it solves the cross-platform problem like no other framework ever could. At least, not with this level Developer Experience and platform integration. I might sound biased because I'm a Flutter dev. But, I'd say to trust the community. Same reason QT is still around and better than ever. Also, in a few years AI will replace us so what even matters /s
bole 3y ago
Here's the truth: Google's services are like sand, and you shouldn't build your house (your business) on top of sand.
vlugovsky 3y ago
I recently compared the number of Jobs on Glassdoor in the beginning 2023 and 2024. Flutter had one of the largest declines among of all the tech.
arivero 3y ago
I thought it was the Google's fluffer team, and that would really be a problem.
surajrmal 3y ago
All sorts of teams got affected by layoffs but it means nothing about Google's continued investments in those areas. You don't get articles every time the flutter team grows by a few engineers...
dps03 3y ago
No one is asking what I think is an obvious question... How much of this is driven by AI? Not for investing employees into, but Rather because the are seeing fewer devs being able to do more with the help of AI. I'm thinking that's part of it.
- akmarinov 3y ago
  That’s not really a thing Which GenAI product would enable that?
hgyjnbdet 3y ago
They better not f*ck over dart/flutter! I chose them to learn over all the various web frameworks for app development. I like dart. I was worried about Google pulling the plug, but took the risk based on dart/flutter being used internally. Google: don't make the time I've invested a waste please.
beefnugs 2y ago
Any insider knowledge about how this will affect flutter? Like will the 3+year old bug request to work with firefox be more likely now? Or is this just entirely bad and I should not consider new project using flutter?

122 points by busymom0 3y ago

Not surprised. Flutter similar to many Google iniatives have no to minimal revenue tie in. This applies as well to grpc, bazel, beam, dart, fuschia, golang, gerrit. Personally I would not use any open source project that has less than 40% of the active contributions from non Google parties.

alrs 3y ago
I think Go is unique in this list in that the only other language that fills the same niche is Java, and Google can't afford to let the licensing whims of Oracle decide its fate. That said, I'm actively rooting for the demise of some of the others.
- itsjzt 3y ago
  Kotlin is always an option and it also interpolates well with Java.
  - dinvlad 3y ago
    Kotlin is also at the whim of one company (JetBrains), unfortunately..
- Ancalagon 3y ago
  Wow losing support for Golang is a scary thought I hadn’t considered until now.
  - dinvlad 3y ago
    I'm waiting nervously in anticipation.. But I wouldn't be surprised tbh
  - neonsunset 3y ago
    Another option is C#, it keeps getting active development, is the closest[0] in performance to pure unmanaged tier of languages and has tooling similar to Rust's cargo, isn't being abandoned any time soon (it's a core dependency of msft and seems to be increasing in amounts of promotion (finally!)), and has other industry players also working on it (like Unity). [0] https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/box-plot-summary-charts.html https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/...
  - eloisant 3y ago
    Golang is popular enough that development would continue even without Google. Could be a fork with a different name if needed, but it's not going anywhere. Too many companies are relying on it.
- deleted 3y ago
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deleted 3y ago
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reindeerer 3y ago
They are so entrenched on gerrit, it's so uniquely terrible. Should have bought Gitlab when there was the moment
- NoahKAndrews 3y ago
  Gerrit's model is pretty interesting

ecshafer 3y ago

This is a shame that they are losing their jobs. But I can not be surprised at all. Flutter (and Dart) really just never seemed to have a reason to exist, and have not caught any traction.

zinekeller 3y ago
I personally think that the idea of Flutter has a potential in itself (see React Native), but bundling it with Dart makes it a non-starter.
- RantyDave 3y ago
  I like Dart. I don't like the quantity of asynchrony I have to fight with to use it, but that's a "modern world" thing and there's little I can do about it. But picking up dart from a C++/Python/Objective-C/Javascript background was dead easy and even occasionally pleasant.
- muzani 3y ago
  Dart was a good language and it applied what we learned about mobile app dev into a language suited for it. I always thought Java was a clumsy option for mobile dev. It seemed like a good move IMO. There are going to be people resistant to learning new things anyway, and those people would stick with RN (coming from JS/React) or native (coming from Java/native). Android later took a lot of the learnings from Dart and applied it there. I wouldn't say Flutter was a waste, it was just deprecated because there was little advantage over native Android.
  - krust 3y ago
    what about Kotlin?
criticalfault 3y ago
I think dart was meant to be used as a JavaScript alternative. Google was working on chrome with dart VM even... But as far as I remember it got abandoned due to pushback from the 'community' due to 'not wanting fragmentation'. Obviously by people who didn't want things changed. Web is the only place where we don't have an alternative and dart would be a great contender.

throwaway5959 3y ago

People have to stop building on Google software/apis. You’re just doing it to yourself at this point if you have any other alternative (obviously Android isn’t included in this).

sattoshi 3y ago
Which is probably part of the reason Flutter is getting shuttered. The Google brand is too unreliable to capture developer mindshare now.
- karmakaze 3y ago
  But Flutter was the way out of all the fragmented historical legacy Android APIs and offers a cross-platform development experience.
- nmfisher 3y ago
  Flutter isn't getting shuttered though? AFAICT these are company-wide layoffs that are affecting the Flutter team.
- xen0 3y ago
  That the current team has just been mown by the latest swing of the scythe, doesn't mean the product is being killed. At least in some other cases, other teams are being spun up or being changed to take on these projects. Of course, that doesn't mean this isn't disruptive or unfortunate.
iobug 3y ago
In my team I have a policy to not depend on Google, apart from obviously, Android. Their KTLO on every product is absolute poo — will take an MS equivalent any day of the week.
- htrp 3y ago
  I mean Microsoft Access is still around
3y ago

fakedang 3y ago

Serendipitous that just a few days back, I received an email stating that my unused Google Playstore Developer account was going to be shut down. I had only made and taken off one app some years back, and that was built with Flutter, the only mobile app framework that I know. Thankfully I don't make a career out of Flutter, unlike some really talented exceptional folks like Remi Rousselet and Marcin Szalek. Imo, Flutter was such an awesome refresh in mobile, but lost their way when they messed around with Web dev, which was entrenched React territory, with a very shoddy experience. After this announcement, I'll be 100% going with React for my side projects.

krtirtho 3y ago
How's that Flutter's fault? Google shutting down the PlayStore account isn't really related to it at all. And, I'm pretty sure nobody uses Flutter to write blogposts. It's usually used in highly rich/interective sites aka webapps like Rive, Google Earth etc. And it's technology and there is no boundary where innovation stops. It's not like React is the ultimate JS framework. Also, it's kind of Flutter's nature to adapt new platforms. So, I wouldn't say they lost their way. Because if my mobile app can run on Web without much tinkering, I'm signed up for it. So, I'm honestly kind of confused with your opinion.
- fakedang 2y ago
  No, I'm not implying that it was the Google Playstore's fault. I just meant to say that Flutter was awesome when they were mobile focused, and that's the reason I started developing some apps. It's just coincidental that my account got shut down by Google for misuse, when Google shuts down the team building the app framework I used. No shade on Flutter at all (except flutter web, which is still kinda shit). I actually feel a bit sad that there will be no company left out there willing to pick up the slack. > Because if my mobile app can run on Web without much tinkering, I'm signed up for it. Except it won't. You'll suffer from poor SEO, poor rendering, poor performance, everything bad about Flutter. And all unnecessarily.

ein0p 3y ago

Python team too, per twitter.

gregors 3y ago

From the link it doesn't sound like Flutter was singled out specifically, but more of a cut & slash across several teams. Doesn't make it any better though.

infamouscow 3y ago

[flagged]

unsignednoop 3y ago

[dead]

ChrisArchitect 3y ago

Link should be the referenced/deep linked comment: https://www.reddit.com/r/FlutterDev/comments/1cduhra/more_layoffs_for_the_flutter_team/l1j9eoo/ https://www.reddit.com/r/FlutterDev/comments/1cduhra/more_la...

pyb 3y ago
Now I'm even more concerned for the future of Flutter.

1letterunixname 3y ago

Repeated layoffs: how to tell your other employees that you hate them and want them to leave also. These damn investors and MBB consultants put a bug in managements' ear that costs must be cut everywhere while mindlessly sabotaging core profit centers and essential infrastructure in myriad indirect ways.

brettkromkamp 3y ago

It doesn’t seem to me that Flutter was singled-out. Google is going through a phase of company-wide cuts (for example, a lot of people in their Python team have just been made redundant, as well). It also looks like there is a substantial amount of development (still) taking place in and around Flutter… think Impeller and WASM-support (to name but a few). On the whole, Flutter’s ecosystem seems to be, at least, reasonably healthy. All of this does not mean that Google won’t kill Flutter at some point. I just don’t think it will be now.

ephemeral-life 3y ago
Even if google kills flutter, I think the project has reached the point where it can live on without them. The framework and ecosystem has been around for years by now and in the time its been around, its been maintained by some seriously smart people. It can live on with a smaller team, new features will just take a little longer. Obviously its still sad when people get layed off though.
- pzo 3y ago
  Google GWT and ecosystem is dead even though it was greatly popular - today nobody consider it to make a new app with that. Same with Facebook Parse - once Meta stopped supporting it most people don't use it even though it was open sourced and seems community still work on it - instead people use Firebase or Supabase. Flutter is more complex and more ambitious than GWT or Parse - it has currently 12k+ open issues, imagine how many developers you need to resolve all of those. Without Google support Flutter would be practically dead - no company would consider it for any serious new project and instead would go with React Native, PWA, unity, jetbrain compose multiplatform
  - Zigurd 3y ago
    I tried GWT years ago and it seemed clunky. It reminded me of Swing and SavaJe. Learning Flutter now, which seems vastly better. as you point out "more complex and more ambitious" but also seems much more ready for creating end-user-facing software.

firecall 3y ago

The Reddit thread is of a link to a Tweet... > https://twitter.com/leighajarett/status/1783848728878522620?t=gx4pLcWymgM0sFGFMqMJfA https://twitter.com/leighajarett/status/1783848728878522620?... With no solid information other than a to say "Some amazing #Flutter folks were impacted by the latest round of layoffs.". So that could be 3, 30 or 300 people. Who knows! Not defending Google, but to worry that Flutter is dead in the water is premature. But having said that... it's Google! Once bitten, and all that!

rokkitmensch 3y ago
One should definitely not worry that Flutter is drag in the water. One should draw a conclusion based on past performance (being the best predictor of future behavior) that Flutter will at some unknowable point in the future be dead in the water. Managing the risk of that impact to projects is of course each individual engineers business and responsibility.

lr1970 3y ago

Related discussion on HN [0] with 1000+ comments when Hixie was let go from google. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38381573 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38381573

eseidel 3y ago
Lol. Hixie quit. https://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1700627373&count=1 https://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1700627373&count=1
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]

ohthatsnotright 3y ago

Good to see a $2T market cap company doesn't have enough revenue to retrain and reassign these employees. I'd hate to think what the shareholders would have to endure had they not done layoffs.

m00x 3y ago
Many Google layoffs were just teams shutting down and employees had 2-3 months to team match. Google hired way too much during pandemic. From what I hear from G friends, this is likely a low performer prune.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- Ancalagon 3y ago
  This has been the message for all these layoffs - thousands of people. How many low performers did Google hire? Where's the accountability at the leadership level for this failure?
  - jbaczuk 3y ago
    Sure the leadership probably failed too, but don't the "performers" have any accountability?
    - zzzbra 3y ago
      if it's a percentage based cut then it's predetermined in a sense. leadership is just doing this as a blood sacrifice to the animal spirits of the market.
  - bloppe 3y ago
    If only 1% of Google employees are low performers, that's thousands of people.
    - 3y ago

hackergary 3y ago

reinventing native UI, good riddance I remember when it started, trolls were telling me how my React Native stack is bad and how active flutter's github is, how it was trending with stars. I'm like bro, having way more issues than stars isn't something to be proud of. LOL

ZhadruOmjar 3y ago
Are stars even relevant? How about we track downloads and production use cases. Takes zero effort to star.

krtirtho 3y ago

Tbh, there's no strong evidence supporting the claim ("killing flutter"). Also, google kind of has it's "layoff season". So, it usually affects almost all the teams at their headquarters. But, that doesn't mean killing Flutter. Flutter is actually backed by other companies as well. Not to mention Canonical the biggest one. Also, many Chinese companies uses it as well (biggest are Alibaba, Tencent etc). Google uses Flutter in big projects like The Google Earth, Play Console, GCP console, Ads for mobile etc. Also, Open Source contributors exists. Even if Google abandons Flutter, it'll be around for long time. Because it solves the cross-platform problem like no other framework ever could. At least, not with this level Developer Experience and platform integration. I might sound biased because I'm a Flutter dev. But, I'd say to trust the community. Same reason QT is still around and better than ever. Also, in a few years AI will replace us so what even matters /s

bole 3y ago

Here's the truth: Google's services are like sand, and you shouldn't build your house (your business) on top of sand.

vlugovsky 3y ago

I recently compared the number of Jobs on Glassdoor in the beginning 2023 and 2024. Flutter had one of the largest declines among of all the tech.

arivero 3y ago

I thought it was the Google's fluffer team, and that would really be a problem.

surajrmal 3y ago

All sorts of teams got affected by layoffs but it means nothing about Google's continued investments in those areas. You don't get articles every time the flutter team grows by a few engineers...

dps03 3y ago

No one is asking what I think is an obvious question... How much of this is driven by AI? Not for investing employees into, but Rather because the are seeing fewer devs being able to do more with the help of AI. I'm thinking that's part of it.

akmarinov 3y ago
That’s not really a thing Which GenAI product would enable that?

hgyjnbdet 3y ago

They better not f*ck over dart/flutter! I chose them to learn over all the various web frameworks for app development. I like dart. I was worried about Google pulling the plug, but took the risk based on dart/flutter being used internally. Google: don't make the time I've invested a waste please.

beefnugs 2y ago

Any insider knowledge about how this will affect flutter? Like will the 3+year old bug request to work with firefox be more likely now? Or is this just entirely bad and I should not consider new project using flutter?