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We're forking Flutter

• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• arccy 2y ago
  To still use flutter in the name when your project is called flock seems beyond misleading.
  • throwaway19972 2y ago
    Better than using a distinct name for a mostly-identical project or effort (looking at you, MariaDB).
    • concerndc1tizen 2y ago
      "MariaDB is named after Widenius' younger daughter, Maria. (MySQL is named after his other daughter, My.)" (Wikipedia)
      • philshem 2y ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Widenius https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Widenius
      • throwaway19972 2y ago
        (No insult intended to Maria or Michael, it's a lovely name in itself.)
      • deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
    • SahAssar 2y ago
      Are you suggesting that they should have used a name that might lead Oracle to sue them instead of being clearly differentiated?
  • topspin 2y ago
    Also, there is an existing messaging and collaboration tool called Flock: https://www.flock.com/ https://www.flock.com/
    • mhd 2y ago
      My onions, let me show you them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flock_(web_browser) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flock_(web_browser)
  • ClassyJacket 2y ago
    And a fantastic way to get sued out of existence by a rich corporation.
    • quesera 2y ago
      FWIW, the only realistic legal action right now is a cease and desist letter. Which will be responded to swiftly with no lawsuits or damages exchanged.
• normie3000 2y ago
  > What do you do if the team won't work on that bug for 2 years? Well, if it's a serious bug for your company, then you stop using Flutter. You don't have a choice. You need to keep moving forward. Your team doesn't know how to work on the Flutter framework, and the Flutter framework team is either unresponsive, or at least completely non-committal towards a fix. Are there no escape hatches?
  • michaelmior 2y ago
    > Your team doesn't know how to work on the Flutter framework The only escape hatch I can think of is to either have the team learn how to work on Flutter itself or hire someone who can.
    • mckn1ght 2y ago
      Xplat FWs are just technical debt to prove a concept. Once you find critical mass the first order of business should be converting to native so you can remove that entire layer of additional complexity. Similar to paying down student debt to minimize how much interest you wind up paying on them after getting a good job. IMO this should be the natural order if you size use it at all, not the emergency case.
      • michaelmior 2y ago
        > that entire layer of additional complexity There are different ways to think about complexity. In terms of the code that's being executed, certainly using a cross-platform framework is likely to result in more complex code as the final output. However, for apps that do not need to use a lot of native features, cross-platform frameworks can significantly reduce the amount of code that needs to be written. It also means that the entire mobile team can become experts in one framework rather than needing iOS and Android folks. That said, it's certainly still helpful to have deep platform knowledge to debug/optimize in certain situations. But I think the point where using a cross-platform framework stops making sense is going to be very different for different applications.
• mvac 2y ago
  Very sad article to read. I just expect the original Flutter will now die a slow death. I applaud the effort and hope they will be able to find a monetization model that works to support the development. There have been similar projects based on technologies that Microsoft has killed (Silverlight -> OpenSilver and various .NET-based cross-platform technologies) that serve their customers well. Unfortunately, none of them are in any way "mainstream" like Flutter is today.
  • normie3000 2y ago
    > There have been similar projects based on technologies that Microsoft has killed Isn't flutter from google?
    • michaelmior 2y ago
      Yes. But the other technologies mentioned were from Microsoft.
    • mvac 2y ago
      Yes, it is. I was just thinking about what happened when other companies did something similar.
      • spwa4 2y ago
        Didn't Google suddenly kill GWT, which is a bit like flutter?
        • DannyBee 2y ago
          No, it transitioned it to others after signaling it would for well over a year, so i don't think you could call it sudden: "In 2011 with the introduction of the Dart programming language, Google stated that GWT would continue to be supported for the foreseeable future while also hinting at a possible rapprochement between the two Google approaches to structured web programming. However, they also mentioned that several of the engineers previously working on GWT are now working on Dart.[6] In 2012 at their annual I/O conference, Google announced that GWT would be transformed from a Google project to a fully open-sourced project.[7] In July 2013, Google posted on its GWT blog that the transformation to an open-source project was completed.[8]" Google funded/helped for some number of years after that. It still is going, afaik, with gwt 2.11 being released in january, 2024. https://www.gwtproject.org/ https://www.gwtproject.org/
• riku_iki 2y ago
  > What do you do if the team won't work on that bug for 2 years? Well, if it's a serious bug for your company, then you stop using Flutter. You don't have a choice. You need to keep moving forward. Your team doesn't know how to work on the Flutter framework, and the Flutter framework team is either unresponsive, or at least completely non-committal towards a fix. they could pay contributor or issue bug bounty..
  • hobs 2y ago
    Based on the article's premise getting that merged is the problem, not fixing code.
    • riku_iki 2y ago
      right, making maintainers happy is part of that work.
      • throwaway032023 2y ago
        Yeah this isn’t drive-by contributions where you shit out a PR that works for you but makes the test infra fail and you get upset. Ppl need to think big picture. One big problem, I think, it may not be visible all of the test infrastructure if your outside google. Don’t know. Gerritt is its own world and googlers live there not in GH (it appears).
• rubiquity 2y ago
  They estimate there are one million Flutter developers/users. Have I been sleeping under a rock?
  • normie3000 2y ago
    I was wondering the same. How many Android developers are there?!
  • yieldcrv 2y ago
    they're just too close to the problem and overestimating their relevance. just because someone cloned a repo once or an NPM package was downloaded doesn't mean someone is a flutter dev. I don't know what the best metric would be, but its relevance is definitely overstated
    • fhd2 2y ago
      Yeah, people like to count their "downloads" and call that their "users", but it's at least an order of magnitude difference in my experience. Sometimes a 100x difference.
  • muglug 2y ago
    Assuming there are 20 million software engineers in the world writing code professionally, 1 million Flutter developers seems massively optimistic.
    • lysace 2y ago
      Yes. Realistically off by at least a magnitude. There is literally zero chance there's 1 million active developers working on this experimental Google Tech out there.
      • Barrin92 2y ago
        >working on this experimental Google Tech while I'd agree with you that 1 million is too high, Flutter certainly is not experimental Google tech. It's widely used in particular internationally. I talked to a ByteDance guy two or three years ago and I think they alone had about 1k Flutter engineers. Nubank, Alibaba, BMW, Ebay use it extensively. Flawed metric but eyeballing VScode Extension installs, Python 140m, c# 30 mil, Go 15 mil, Flutter 10 mil. It is very, very popular.
• justmarc 2y ago
  Flutter is truly a piece of great tech with remarkable quality and value. I hope the right path will be found. I think companies using it for commercial purposes (like what we're doing) should contribute something to the effort to help make sure Flutter not only survives, but flourishes. Bug bounties, supporting individual developers, supporting efforts and initiatives, professional services, or any other way that helps the project move forward will be great.
  • normie3000 2y ago
    > Flutter is truly a piece of great tech with remarkable quality and value. How does it compare to React Native from user and developer experience perspectives? Are there other competitors?
    • justmarc 2y ago
      Faster and better in almost every respect we've looked at vs React Native or Electron. We're super happy with this choice we made quite some time ago. I'm not qualified to give an in depth review/comparison, however. Edit: we use flutter to build an app which runs on iOS, Android, macOS, Windows and Linux -- the same code base with pretty minor adaptations to desktop vs mobile and different screen sizes. The experience has so far been fantastic. It's fast, it's relatively light weight, it's performant, it's a pleasure and we couldn't imagine doing it any other way.
      • acmecorps 2y ago
        We have worked with flutter since 2019; having built internal apps for our staff, public apps for our customers, small utility apps etc- this has been our experience as well. Not only flutter has been rock solid, easy and fast to develop, it has a wide array of libraries. Long may it continue.
    • ko27 2y ago
      It's better in most ways, for example, just recently LG decided to rewrite its TV apps from RN to Flutter https://webostv.developer.lge.com/news/2024-07-15-new-and-successful-experiment-of-webos-with-flutter https://webostv.developer.lge.com/news/2024-07-15-new-and-su... > Most of our apps use React. When we first adopted React, we were pleased with the development productivity it provided, but sadly its initial performance was subpar in terms of start-up time, memory consumption, and responsiveness. After significant and complicated optimizations we reached performance benchmarks that were good enough, and yet we desired a new technology that was both fast and simple. > To our delight, our very first prototype with Flutter easily exceeded our target benchmarks! Without any optimization whatsoever, our Flutter rewrite launched twice as fast as our original app, consumed less runtime memory, and felt more responsive and playful to use
• politelemon 2y ago
  Who is 'we'? I'm not familiar enough with this ecosystem to understand. Is this one person or a set of existing contributors, or something else?
  • mihular 2y ago
    Exactly my thoughts. How anybody would take it seriously if the people behind are not known, is beyond me. Anyway I left flutter a long time ago exactly because the mentioned problems - ridiculously slow response time fixing bugs, like auto fill want working.
• theLiminator 2y ago
  Honestly makes sense to me. If Google has proven one thing is that it generally maintains a very tight grip on anything open-source that they ship. Ie. it's extremely hard to contribute upstream. This is fine when it's a package that's critical to good, so they invest a lot into it (for example, Jax). But for stuff that's not quite there, it means fixes will meander for months if not years.
• Topfi 2y ago
  As someone reliant on Flutter, it is likely better to rip off the band-aid now than wait for a slow, prolonged decline. That being said, whilst I am at least somewhat comforted that the person taking charge is someone who was involved with the Flutter team at Google in the past, rather than a random, overenthusiastic person, I have a few crucial criticisms on this post that make me skeptical. For one, I'd recommend adding a newsletter field to the website/blog, simply so those who may not want to test or participate right away can stay in the loop. More importantly though, the two links asking for reviewers and leads just link to a private Eggs account, which, even before someone decided it was a good idea to just make content appear in an unsorted manner (random post from 2023, then 2021, then 2024, then 2020, ...), has never been an ideal approach for such projects in my opinion. I honestly thought I had clicked on the wrong links when two eggs profiles appeared in new tabs. Forcing potential devs to create a third-party account on a social media site, then send in DMs is likely not the best way to get such a major project of the ground and having public repos or at least a contact form set up would go a long way, especially since that also makes it easier to enforce some ruleset for applications. Additionally, consider listing what changes have been implemented in Flock at this stage. As it stands, it appears impossible to easily tell what one can expect without diving into the changes [0] one-by-one. Still, wishing you the best as Flutters development and approach to both what goes into which branch, as well as keeping up-to-date with UI elements in target OSs has been leaving a lot to be desired to say the least. I still feel that, despite all shortcomings, for certain applications and workflows, Flutter/Dart remains the best, and it would be a shame to see it unmaintained. [0] https://github.com/flutter/flutter/compare/master...Flutter-Foundation:flutter:upstream_sync https://github.com/flutter/flutter/compare/master...Flutter-...
  • eseidel 2y ago
    Flutter Founder here. If you ever have any concerns re: Flutter, please don't ever hesitate to reach out. eric@shorebird.dev
    • ignoramous 2y ago
      > Flutter Founder here. Flutter was a company acquired ala Firebase? Always thought it was a project (like Golang) incubated by/for/at Google.
• plorkyeran 2y ago
  > That's 50 people serving the needs of 1,000,000. Doing a little bit of division, that means that every single member of the Flutter team is responsible for the needs of 20,000 Flutter developers! That ratio is clearly unworkable for any semblance of customer support. If "only" 50 people working on a project used by one million people was unworkably low then every single successful project out there would be doomed. I've certainly worked on things with much worse ratios than that. > one has to critically assess why a team that loves external contributions has only managed to merge contributions from 1,500 developers over a span of nearly a decade. External contributions from 1500 developers over a decade is a lot. That is an unusually high number, not a low one, and backs up Flutter's claim to love external contributions. The fact that this person thinks that they can just magically conjure up dozens of volunteer PR reviewers is wild. Everything about this post makes it pretty clear that they don't have the slightest clue of the scope of what they're trying to do. This feels like one of the standard examples of an ex-bigco person setting off on their own with no understanding how just how much the bigco did in the background to facilitate their job.
  • bsimpson 2y ago
    It struck me that they estimate that the number of qualified contributors is 1000, but the number _so far_ is 1500. They're slightly different things (as the post notes, the bigger number includes copy editors), but still…
  • kgeist 2y ago
    Our user base is of a similar order of magnitude, with around 70 developers. It doesn’t seem like a large number, indeed! A small minority frequently contacts support, suggests features, etc., while the majority simply uses the product.
  • johnnyanmac 2y ago
    these are also 50 google devs (that may or may not be at the company anymore) by this estimate. They could have just said there were critical tickets not addressed by Gooogle and their PR's ignored, and would have gotten a much more sympathetic response.
• punduk 2y ago
  The main problem in projects like flutter is to always focus on the "new". If you focus on the new without stabilizing the existing basic features, you will accumulate thousands of problems. If the same path is followed in this new project, I think the result will be the same. There is still no clear update on issues opened years ago. and most are pretty basic needs.
• markus_zhang 2y ago
  I must be living under the rock. I thought Flutter is prosperous? I only dabbed into Android development as a learning experience so I probably missed something important. If everything the article says is true, should I switch to Kotlin?
• sgt 2y ago
  Key statement: "As Flock ships important bug fixes and features, the Flutter team can then choose to add those to Flutter, on their schedule. " I see a lot of negative comments but I think this will be a net positive over time to the Flutter community and to the technology itself. I think it will also give Google a reality check on the needs of the community.
  • eseidel 2y ago
    Flutter Founder here. I'm very pro open-source, and pro taking-action, so hopefully good things will come out of it. I think this particular author is mostly stirring up a bunch of noise and does not represent a significant chunk of the community, but we'll see. :shrug:
    • irq-1 2y ago
      > ...the Flutter team is in maintenance mode for 3 of its 6 supported platforms. Desktop is quite possibly the greatest untapped value for Flutter, but it's now mostly stagnant. Can you make any comment on this? Is it accurate?
      • eseidel 2y ago
        I can no longer speak for the Google team (since I no longer lead it), but my understanding is that yes, Google is focusing their efforts on other platforms rather than Desktop (despite themselves using Flutter on Desktop for a variety of platforms). Canonical is contributing to the Desktop efforts substantially.
        • loic-sharma 2y ago
          Canonical gave an update on Flutter desktop last weekend at their Ubuntu Summit: https://events.canonical.com/event/51/contributions/533/ https://events.canonical.com/event/51/contributions/533/
          • wiseowise 2y ago
• maxrmk 2y ago
  > That's 50 people serving the needs of 1,000,000. Doing a little bit of division, that means that every single member of the Flutter team is responsible for the needs of 20,000 Flutter developers! That ratio is clearly unworkable for any semblance of customer support. Back when I worked on .net we had fewer than 50 people maintaining a product that shipped to over a billion machines. If you opened an issue on github we'd usually reply that day. It's getting a bit long in the tooth, but I feel like 'the mythical man month' should still be required reading for software devs. More devs != better.
  • hinkley 2y ago
    50 developers can do an awful lot - if they aren’t trapped in a feature factory environment. The constant pressure to ship new features instead of only widely desired features overtaxes a team quickly.
  • kgeist 2y ago
    WhatsApp once had just 50 engineers with 900M users: https://www.wired.com/2015/09/whatsapp-serves-900-million-users-50-engineers/ https://www.wired.com/2015/09/whatsapp-serves-900-million-us...
    • KeplerBoy 2y ago
      What more do you need? That's still plenty of people if you got a few thousand people at AWS/Azure or in this case Meta's in-house cloud making sure your service is running and scaling as it should.
    • maxrmk 2y ago
      That ethos runs through everything the WA team does. I learned a bit about it when I was at fb and I was beyond impressed by how few servers WA used for its core infrastructure. It's a really well engineered product.
    • l11r 2y ago
      As far as I know Telegram has around the same number of engineers even today, handling around the same size userbase.
• cbb330 2y ago
  Flutterfoundation.dev Was created for flock? This seems less of a fork and more of an attempted annex
• textlapse 2y ago
  If someone could do the same with Xamarin/Maui that would be awesome! It’s going down the same path unfortunately as Flutter did. Microsoft has de-staffed and deprioritized Xamarin/Maui to a point most of the folks are in Aspire-dotnet and related efforts?
  • ClassyJacket 2y ago
    It's such a shame mobile development with C# isn't more viable. I want to make some apps, and I hate JavaScript, but from everything I've read Maui just isn't practical.
    • eseidel 2y ago
      Flutter has seen a lot of Xamarin refugees. Even the founder of Xamarin himself is a big Flutter fan: https://twitter.com/migueldeicaza/status/1778759403451081159 https://twitter.com/migueldeicaza/status/1778759403451081159
    • ivm 2y ago
      The native approach is quite viable: my MvvmCross-based app has been on both stores since 2018 with almost zero MAUI/Xamarin-related issues, even with hundreds of thousands of installs. Not gonna lie though: building the UI twice for both iOS and Android feels somewhat masochistic. But in the end, it "just works" with shared View/ViewModel logic on both platforms.
• throwaway032023 2y ago
  Words are cheap. Seems like: - guy wants to add PR more aggressively to a code base than Flutter currently is - isn’t clear if they have a concept of handling compatibility between fork and original - why not be a labor organizing entity and work with the flutter team? Some of the PR that I am aware of that are stale and could be good candidates - are difficult design decisions and stakes need to be put in the group. It seems ill advised. This is huge amount of work with limited upside and huge downside (adding uncertainty to outsiders looking in) and tons of effort (just in infrastructure maintenance). Edit: if I were conspiracy oriented I would think it’s to harm community. I would pay this no mind.
  • johnnyanmac 2y ago
    Note that I know nothing of the Flutter team/culture and am only answering generally: >why not be a labor organizing entity and work with the flutter team? Depends on the maintainers/team. I've definitely seen many a bureaucracy that slows down FOSS to a crawl of bug fixes and feature progression. If you make enough PRs that are ignored for weeks or months, you'll realize this isn't really a team ready for nor interested in a proper FOSS environment and it's instead mostly "that teams code that happens to be readable". Their official answer seems to suggest as much: >But, sadly, trying to work with the Flutter team delivers a different reality. While some developers have had success working with the Flutter team, many other developers have found it frustrating, if not unworkable. I guess we'll see. I'm way more of the mentality of "actions speak louder" so I'm not really one to announce my plans until I get something worthwhile off the ground (in this case, a few stale PR's that feel like game changers to the customers). But that's not a mentality modern social media rewards.
    • throwaway032023 2y ago
      There is a comment above that shows the founding former didn’t want to fix tests in his PR. Flutter is massive and it’s critical infrastructure. The tests are critical to up-keep. The tests are probably a majority of the work. Which makes sense for something that has such a large surface area. I think this is an emotional reaction from someone has never managed a large project. Merging PRs and releasing them isn’t the problem. I hope they understand that. Flutter is amazing. Web, desktop and mobile that actually work is nearly magical. Yes there are priorities. Yes the desktop isn’t as high priority of web. It does work. Hell. Collect money and fund Hixie or others to prioritize patches community feel should go in. That is constructive and methodical/reproducible. Forking a massive code base, applying PR and not conforming to the source repo standards (tests whether that is golden or not) - just seems not well thought out. I think community could fund a well known developer to fix desktop issues and have PR adhere to Flutter standards. It’s a ton of work. But seems like it’s a money/dev/process issue. Not a PR merging exercise.
• peppertree 2y ago
  The fork is called "flock" and it's part of "flutter foundation"? It appears they forked Google's confusing branding strategy as well.
  • pzo 2y ago
    wait for similar WordPress drama if google owns 'flutter' trademark.
    • zippergz 2y ago
      They do.
      • politelemon 2y ago
        Yeah you are right. https://docs.flutter.dev/brand https://docs.flutter.dev/brand I expect there will be some communication from Google at some point and the foundation will have to be renamed. It reminds me of OpenTF being renamed to OpenTofu.
• concerndc1tizen 2y ago
  Who's "We're" ? I only see a single name? Is this just some dude with a blog?
  • snug 2y ago
    1 developer supporting 1 developer, better ratio than Google
• erichocean 2y ago
  > That's 50 people serving the needs of 1,000,000. The SQLite developers must find this rationale hilarious.
• Vt71fcAqt7 2y ago
  >But, sadly, trying to work with the Flutter team delivers a different reality. While some developers have had success working with the Flutter team, many other developers have found it frustrating, if not unworkable. I'd love to see some examples. I've had my pull request merged in a fairly quick amount of time - less than one release cycle, which is what matters here. Also frankly, nobody forking Flutter will be nearly skilled enough to work on the Flutter engine (Impeller). So it's hard to take this announcement seriously.
  • pzo 2y ago
    > Also frankly, nobody forking Flutter will be nearly skilled enough to work on the Flutter engine (Impeller). For me its so weird they ditched google/skia to develop Impeller in Dart from scratch in the first place. If skia was not ready they could move just 1-2 developers to Skia team to collaborate with them. Now they want to even write their own 3d rendering lib based on Impeller (flutter_gpu, flutter_scene) even thought google has already mature 3d engine in C++ (google/filament). For me from the outside looks like "not envented in our team" syndrome. We are now in funny situation that react native has react-native-skia and react-native-filament and Flutter teams reinvents the wheels.
    • xster 2y ago
      https://github.com/flutter/engine/blob/main/impeller/docs/faq.md#what-makes-impeller-different-compared-to-skia-for-flutter https://github.com/flutter/engine/blob/main/impeller/docs/fa... discusses the reasoning a bit. There's more of a difference in the approach
      • Vt71fcAqt7 2y ago
        Also related: https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/77412 https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/77412 - Hixie's issue that led to Impeller (or one of many issues) Some related iOS jank issues from that time: https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/32170 https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/32170 https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/61450 https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/61450
• DotaFan 2y ago
  [dead]
• mannyv 2y ago
  Hopefully this will turn into an EGCS-like situation.
• pjmlp 2y ago
  And so it slowly starts what everyone was expecting from Google projects that don't bring millions back home.
• mkrishnan 2y ago
  [dead]
• pzo 2y ago
  > How large is the Flutter team, today? Google doesn't publish this information, but my guess is that the team is about 50 people strong. I doubt google have even 50 flutter devs in their team. You can easily estimate by checking github pulse: https://github.com/flutter/flutter/pulse/monthly https://github.com/flutter/flutter/pulse/monthly https://github.com/flutter/engine/pulse/monthly https://github.com/flutter/engine/pulse/monthly Also take into account inflated commits by CI bots: engine-flutter-autoroll, skia-flutter-autoroll, auto-submit[bot], fluttergithubbot, flutter-pub-roller-bot
  • xster 2y ago
    https://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1714717681&count=1 https://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1714717681&count=1 is a sensible estimation
    • pzo 2y ago
      Actions (commits) speak better than words for me - flutter managers like (kevmoo) that are responsible for PR what gonna say? Probably you not gonna hear form them "Sorry we had layoffs and unfortunately our team is to small to handle all issues for now" Same with previous google employees that are still invested in flutter ecosystems by launching commercial products around it even if not at google anymore.
      • throwaway032023 2y ago
        This sounds bitter and misinformed. Check automotive grade Linux and check GitHub for flutter embedders. Flutter being deployed all over the place. It’s impressive. The tooling and DX is excellent.
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• KTibow 2y ago
  > Communication monoculture This point seems like a callout to a certain discussion and I kind of want to see it
  • jonahx 2y ago
    This kind of PC-jargon also makes me want to place a bet that the alleged "monoculture" is some perfectly reasonable insistence on either clarity or basic politeness. Willing to be proved wrong though!
• skywhopper 2y ago
  Weird, I'd never heard of Flutter (or at least it never registered), but then I'm an infra engineer, so why would I have? But particularly strange is that if you go to flutter.dev, you'll notice you can't find anything about who Flutter is. There's no about page with links to the people behind it, or any indication of what company sponsors it. Then this flutterfoundation.dev site... weirdly also doesn't say who's behind it. Presumably some outside folks? Maybe just the one person who wrote this blog post? But if it's called "Flutter Foundation" I would expect it to be more officially sanctioned? Were I in the market for a UI framework, none of this would make me feel very confident.
  • munificent 2y ago
    > But particularly strange is that if you go to flutter.dev, you'll notice you can't find anything about who Flutter is. It's on the front page: "A Global Open Source Community. Supported by Google, open to everyone."
    • filleduchaos 2y ago
      I had to scroll for fourteen whole seconds on my phone to reach that part of the landing page. Completely invisible if you ask me.
    • skywhopper 2y ago
      “Supported by Google” doesn’t communicate “owned by Google”, and anyway, marketing text in the middle of the page is not particularly telling. I expect a site about some technology to have an About page with some information about who is behind it and who funds it. Compare https://go.dev/project https://go.dev/project which explicitly mentions that Google runs the show. The front page makes it clear that Google runs the language’s cloud infra. Plus there’s the Google logo in the footer. The Flutter page never mentions who runs it. If it’s independent but sponsored by Google, there ought to still be people involved. If it’s owned by Google, it should be clear about it, and not just indirectly mention it.
  • eseidel 2y ago
    Well, myself and a few hundred other contributors are behind Flutter. Happy to answer questions. The flutter.dev page got rewritten to be more "marketing friendly" a few years back. docs.flutter.dev is still maintained by the engineers however. Regarding who exactly contributes to Flutter, it's all on GitHub, so you can see the actual committers, e.g. https://github.com/flutter/flutter/graphs/contributors https://github.com/flutter/flutter/graphs/contributors https://github.com/flutter/engine/graphs/contributors https://github.com/flutter/engine/graphs/contributors https://github.com/dart-lang/sdk/graphs/contributors https://github.com/dart-lang/sdk/graphs/contributors As for flutterfoundation.dev, it appears to be just Matt? Who used to be employed at Google and reported to me on the Flutter team but is no longer.
• chx 2y ago
  > Imagine that you're the engineering director, or CTO of a company whose next release is blocked by some Flutter bug. What do you do if the team won't work on that bug for 2 years? Then you fix the bug? If your team can't then pay a consultant who can? Isn't it open source? What did I miss?
• skybrian 2y ago
  Back when I worked on GWT, we had trouble accepting outside contributions because the team had a mandate to support Googlers. That is, much like other libraries and tools at Google, changes could not break google3. This means testing patches against google3 and either changing the patch, or fixing whatever code used it, and these are tasks that no outsider can do. Shepherding these patches is no fun when you have your own changes to work on that are more important to the team. We did something similar, by creating an external fork where changes could be tried out by the community, without necessarily being accepted into the internal version. I think a fork could work if there was enough external momentum, but even 20 people working full time would actually be pretty good for an open source project. How many developers will this fork attract? The fork would need to attract other businesses who can put people on it. One downside is that the code isn't tested against google3. Sometimes you find actual bugs that way. Edit: reading more closely, the complaint doesn't seem to be that patches weren't reviewed, but rather that bug reports weren't investigated. That's definitely something outside developers could do more of, and seems a lot easier than forking?
  • odo1242 2y ago
    What is google3?
    • JoelEinbinder 2y ago
      Google's monorepo of closed source code.
    • gmoot 2y ago
      Google's internal monorepo.
    • deleted 2y ago
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• jwildeboer 2y ago
  How many people are the “we” this blog post talks about? 5 people? 500?
• ckastner 2y ago
  > flutterfoundation.dev It's not Flutter by own admission, it's very likely not backed by a foundation, and I highly doubt that Google consented to its "Flutter" trademark used for such a foundation.
  • Apocryphon 2y ago
    Should've gotten flockfoundation
    • gremlinsinc 2y ago
      or idgaflock.com
  • croemer 2y ago
    Good chance that Google legal won't be happy and ask the website to be taken down. https://docs.flutter.dev/brand https://docs.flutter.dev/brand
• appveyor 2y ago
  Is there any way to contact project owners besides X "formerly Twitter"?
• schnable 2y ago
  What's the Flutter Foundation?
• dadrian 2y ago
  Raise rates.
• macspoofing 2y ago
  I'm confused .. is this a Google-led fork? Is "Flutter Foundation" a google sponsored foundation? If not, why use "Flutter" trademark? Also, if the fork is called "Flock", why is this called a "Flutter Foundation"?
  • echoangle 2y ago
    Google is the „owner“ of flutter, why would they fork their own thing? The post is describing the problem the author has with google.
    • ClassyJacket 2y ago
      But they're using the Flutter trademark. It's a fair question. They appear to be using a trademark owned by someone else without permission.
      • echoangle 2y ago
        Right, give it a few days and the domain will change.
    • macspoofing 2y ago
      They kind of did it before with DartAngular. Maybe this is a Red Hat/CentOS division, where Flock is an upstream community edition and Flutter is ... I don't know. I asked because it is confusing. My assumption would be that if this is an independent organization they couldn't use 'Flutter' because that is a registered trademark of Google, and they would say they are not connected to Google. I'm looking through their website and github repo for any statement that either asserts or denies a connection to Google - and I'm not seeing it.
• swyx 2y ago
  more context on flutter layoffs: https://www.theregister.com/2024/04/29/google_python_flutter_layoffs/ https://www.theregister.com/2024/04/29/google_python_flutter...
  • Alifatisk 2y ago
    The layoffs wasn’t Flutter specific, it happened across all orgs.
• coffeeaddict1 2y ago
  > What do you do if the team won't work on that bug for 2 years? This is reminiscent of how the Qt Company operates. Qt is super buggy and their bug tracker is full of unresolved bugs from years ago. However, the difference is that if you're a premium user you can pay for premium support to get someone to fix your bug.
• 1propionyl 2y ago
  I really hate to be the big downer here but given Google's corporate culture is any of this really a surprise? Google and failure to support are at this point on par with peanut butter and jelly. I wouldn't ever trust anything Google cosigns as likely to have much longevity. At this point I just assume we all know better.
• divan 2y ago
  > We describe Flock as "Flutter+". In other words, we do not want, or intend, to fork the Flutter community. Flock will remain constantly up to date with Flutter. That was the first fear when I saw the title - splitting community and having two incompatible versions. Good to see it addressed in the post. The second was just a fear of how it would complicate the development process, but it seems to be a drop-in replacement (just configuring FVM - Flutter Version Manager): Configure .fvmrc to use Flock: { "flutter": "master", "flutterUrl": "https://github.com/Flutter-Foundation/flutter.git" } Flutter is the best thing that happened to UI development since Qt. Most people don't realize how many apps written in Flutter they use daily, simply because it's impossible to tell. And the frustration described in the post is felt by many CTOs and developers. Especially those who use Flutter for desktop and web. Flutter provides an amazing experience for desktop apps, and precisely because of that, it feels so frustrating when you stumble upon some stupid bug that has been open for a year or two and never gets prioritized. Usually, it's nothing critical, but still requires workarounds and wasting time. I don't know, the idea of Flock sounds good, the main question is engaging the community. Hopefully, the author (who seem to be an ex-Flutter team member himself) have a good grasp on the state of the community. Wishing luck to the project and going to keep an eye on the progress.
  • 1propionyl 2y ago
    Flutter is really not some big revelation and it's always shocking to me how it's evangelists act like it's the game changer no one else has noticed. It's just not that good? Just build native UIs. I don't know why cross platform UI has been such a hobbyhorse for so many for so long: it's a stupid idea.
    • divan 2y ago
      > Just build native UIs Do you see any reasons why many companies/teams/devs don't want to "just build native UIs" and instead are looking for cross-platform solutions designed from ground apps for modern UI development needs?
      • 1propionyl 2y ago
• palata 2y ago
  > That's 50 people serving the needs of 1,000,000. [...] that means that every single member of the Flutter team is responsible for the needs of 20,000 Flutter developers! That ratio is clearly unworkable for any semblance of customer support. Ever heard of e.g. curl? Because a billion users use your software does not mean that you have to talk to a billion users.
  • IshKebab 2y ago
    Curl is easily 1000x simpler than Flutter and has existed for many times longer. Not really comparable.
    • palata 2y ago
      Exactly: the number of users is just not a good way to measure this.
      • kreetx 2y ago
        IMO, the entire number counting argument is beside the point. Workable dev count/user count ratio varies depending on circumstances. A better way would have been that the "in-house Flutter team is slow to accept outside contributions so I'm forking it". EDIT: minor wording
  • eviks 2y ago
    Does curl have any semblance of customer support?
• ibero 2y ago
  | How many Flutter developers exist in the world, today? My guess is that it's on the order of 1,000,000 developers. The real number is probably higher, but one million should be reasonably conservative. one million flutter developers? that does not make sense to me at all (by orders of magnitude). does anyone know any metric to validate this? i am shocked if it's true.
  • britannio 2y ago
    The data is supposedly there: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41975320 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41975320
• munchler 2y ago
  > The team can't fix the bug without information from me, and it's been too long for me to provide information to the team. Ugh. I feel like developers should already know this, but I guess not: If at all possible, please, please, please include a solid reproduction case when reporting bugs. That way you don’t have to remember anything about it. (This is also pretty much the only way you can be certain that the problem isn't actually due to your own error/misunderstanding.)
• briandear 2y ago
  Really not a fan of the flutter concept. “One codebase?” Ok, so how does that make a great iOS app that takes advantage of the full device? Basically coding to the least common denominator. Hire a Swift person. Hire an Android person, and build things in a way that gets the most of of the device. Otherwise, what’s the point of an “app” in the first place. Can use a website if “one codebase” is a goal.
• transitivebs 2y ago
  Where's the actual repo for the fork? It's not linked to anywhere and not listed under the flutter github org...
• brunorsini 2y ago
  Anyone else experiencing déjà vu from the days of transitioning from Angular to Angular 2?
  • divan 2y ago
    No. Angular 2 wasn't a drop-in fork for Angular 1.
• corytheboyd 2y ago
  I like Flutter, and Dart for that matter, but I lost inspiration to keep going because it felt like I was learning something deeply that will be dead in a few years. Why not just learn Swift instead? Or if it must be cross-platform, Qt? Is this the right stance to take? I just want to pick a desktop app development stack that has some staying power, and isn’t riddled with quirks.
  • mardifoufs 2y ago
    I guess flutter web is the "hook" because it promises a "true" cross platform stack, even though imo it is still very lacking. On the other hand, QT on mobile (iOS, android) is also a bit weird, and comes with lots of restrictions and gotchas. And it basically does not have any support for web apps (except for some super recent, very experimental wasm platform support, that would probably be even worse than the "app on canvas" experience that flutter web offers)
• guluarte 2y ago
  I highly doubt there are 1,000,000 flutter developers
• synergy20 2y ago
  This is a welcome fork. Still for me, flutter is not web platform friendly by design(e.g. javascript) and that's the reason I stopped using it and switched to react-native + electronjs(react), they seem more reliable and production ready, plus this approach is totally web friendly.
  • gavindean90 2y ago
    I had the same thought and ended up learning swift and out had been great.
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• stux 2y ago
  https://github.com/flutter/flutter/pulls?q=is%3Apr+author%3Amatthew-carroll https://github.com/flutter/flutter/pulls?q=is%3Apr+author%3A... - 0 open PRs - 2 PRs merged, 1 PR closed in the past 4 years - All PRs reviewed by a member of the Flutter team within 24hrs - [“If I'm still supposed to write tests, even for this change, then this is probably as far as I take the PR.”](https://github.com/flutter/flutter/pull/128910#issuecomment-1592088473 https://github.com/flutter/flutter/pull/128910#issuecomment-...) - 40+ PRs from 2019 So, disgruntled ex-employee?
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  • deskr 2y ago
    I can understand the test frustration on both sides. * He's being asked to fix tests that were already failing. That can be an enormous task depending on the nature of the failure and the code base. * The team doesn't want to merge his PR since they don't have a test. The code is presumably working without his PR and understandably they won't change a single byte without seeing tests work.
    • DaiPlusPlus 2y ago
      If existing tests are failing then how are they accepting any PRs at all?
• bmitc 2y ago
  It really makes me wonder how and why Microsoft and Google can't create a cross-platform GUI ecosystem that lasts. Like, they both will have multiple operating systems and platforms such as web and mobile in use at their company and no doubt build a huge amount of bespoke tools. Wouldn't it behoove themselves to create a cross-platform GUI solution that actually works, is maintained, etc.? I have been looking into building one myself, and for a company the size of Google or Microsoft, the task almost looks trivial. But somehow, they create these huge monstrosities like Flutter and .NET MAUI that crumble under their own weight. This is especially true for Microsoft who sits upon two of the best languages around in C# and F#. Flutter often has a tough sell because it comes with Dart and vice versa. For Microsoft, is it really that hard to have a three-tiered approach to cross-platform development in that there is a separate, dedicated platform for each of web, mobile, and desktop that share common components (like drawing and animation APIs), architectures, paradigms, and of course languages? GUI development on desktops is just a complete mess right now. Qt Quick with QML is okay, but it has a huge amount of strange limitations and has a surprising lack of just plug and plug UI components, like charts. Plus, you have to use either C++ or Python. Flutter seems better but also suffers from the lack of professional plug and plug widgets and requires the use of Dart, which is even less ideal. Plus, it requires the support (or lack thereof) from Google. For Microsoft, I could list at least half a dozen cross-platform approaches in a single blink of the eye.
• hersheyhersh 2y ago
  Flutter founder here. We use Flutter to build Mezzi (www.mezzi.com). In fact, we've worked with the OP (Matt) on our app. He's super knowledgeable about Flutter and it's inner workings. A great dev too. Flutter is awesome, but there are definitely bugs that lie unfixed for an uncomfortable period of time. This is not unique to Flutter ... with any open source project there's a lag between bug reports and bug fixes. The thing I worry about is that its going to be really hard to get a large number of PR reviewers up to speed for this fork, while also maintaining reasonable quality. I think it's going to be difficult to maintain a separate fork without diverging from Flutter, because over time, the fork will accumulate bug fixes and features that the Google version will not accept (by definition, since the proposal is to be more accepting of PRs). How are we supposed to go back to the Google version of Flutter as the fork diverges more and more from the original? Or is the proposal that we should stick with the fork, and the fork will over time pull in the new features and PRs from the Google version? But how will that work after say 12 to 24 months of divergence? There's going to be a hodgepodge of new features and bug fixes on the fork, and then Google will release a new version of Flutter with a whole set of new capabilities ... and we'll be stuck having to choose. Or we'll have to do a really hairy merge between the Fork and the new version from Google. This just seems scary to me. Especially since for any given team, there's usually one ... or maybe two things we want to patch into the Flutter tree. Its easier for us to just apply those fixes onto a new version of Google's flutter tree than it would be to patch a whole community's worth of bug fixes and features onto the new Google tree. I think the preferable course of action is that the community should work with Google to see if there's a way to improve the speed of PR reviews. I'm worried about the chaos that forking could cause in this community that doesn't really have a huge number of contributors yet.
  • stux 2y ago
    > Flutter founder here. Given that the literal founder of Flutter is in this thread using this introduction multiple times, it’s kinda hard to give you the benefit of the doubt that you honestly just meant “a founder using Flutter”.
    • concerndc1tizen 2y ago
• flakes 2y ago
  Who is "we" in all of this? Not even visible on the github org https://github.com/Flutter-Foundation https://github.com/Flutter-Foundation > This organization has no public members. You must be a member to see who’s a part of this organization.
• yellow_postit 2y ago
  Guess Flock is free to use now that Google abandoned their other project named “FLoC”
• xiaodai 2y ago
  [flagged]
• mdaniel 2y ago
  While surfing around the various repos, I was reminded about the bad taste I got from the last time someone sung the praises of Flutter/Dart; this thing is firmly in the "Android SDK-ish" school of thought: download a shitload of prebuilt binaries from storage.googleapis.com, dontyouworryaboutit $ curl -I https://storage.googleapis.com/flutter_infra_release/releases/stable/macos/flutter_macos_3.24.4-stable.zip < content-length: 1575089988 (nod)
  • eseidel 2y ago
    Would you recommend a different distribution mechanism? The Apple binaries are all signed (in accordance with Apple policies), and the team has historically invested significantly in supply chain security. e.g. (a now 2 year old article) https://opensource.googleblog.com/2022/09/flutter-slsa-progress-identity-and-access-management-through-infrastructure-as-code.html https://opensource.googleblog.com/2022/09/flutter-slsa-progr...
    • mdaniel 2y ago
      I'm in the camp of "if I can't build it, then it's not open source" so https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core/blob/d314f3ebba9e79aee939718c612a844285954089/Formula/d/dart-sdk.rb https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core/blob/d314f3ebba9e7... is a good start, but there is no .../f/flutter.rb although there is https://aur.archlinux.org/cgit/aur.git/tree/PKGBUILD?h=flutter https://aur.archlinux.org/cgit/aur.git/tree/PKGBUILD?h=flutt... but I haven't been soaking in the AUR ecosystem long enough to be able to port it to Homebrew All those words to say that if there was a .github/workflow/release.yml showing the steps required to cook a release artifact that would be the best(?) documentation since it is kind of like a Dockerfile in that it's computer executable but mostly human readable I don't mean to poo-poo all the "supply chain security" effort, but you have to recognize that right now it's "trust me, bro" since https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-cask/blob/27c351ccb59fbd3c64e2ce672af9bbdce296621f/Casks/f/flutter.rb https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-cask/blob/27c351ccb59fb... does check the sha256, and good for them, but gives me no way to trace back to any file in https://github.com/flutter/flutter/tree/3.24.4 https://github.com/flutter/flutter/tree/3.24.4
  • 2y ago
• sexyman48 2y ago
  [flagged]
• iml7 2y ago
  I couldn't agree more, """In other words, I believe there are blind spots because Flutter team members don't actually use Flutter.""" Electron creators made atom, the best text editor, and then vscode, And flutter doesn't have a signature app to show that it can be used for serious purposes. Currently, the most famous open source app in the community is appflow.io, I compare the current state of appflow.io to the current state of flutter, even the unfixable bugs. I compare vscode to the JavaScript ecosystem, with both advantages and disadvantages,
• BlursedTarot 2y ago
  "Fear not little Flork..."
• mococa 2y ago
  My bank uses flutter (nubank in Brazil) it have a lot of issues and never it worked fine on iPhone mirroring, which is a pain.
• 1st1 2y ago
  > How large is the Flutter team, today? Google doesn't publish this information, but my guess is that the team is about 50 people strong. > That's 50 people serving the needs of 1,000,000. Doing a little bit of division, that means that every single member of the Flutter team is responsible for the needs of 20,000 Flutter developers! That ratio is clearly unworkable for any semblance of customer support. This is a weird exercise. Python, for example, is a #1/#2 language in the world and there's only 50 active core devs, 90% of which don't even work on Python full time. Somehow we make that work.
  • malkia 2y ago
    Python is an engine, flutter is the whole car.
    • deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    • wruza 2y ago
      I doubt that complexity of a language is comparable to that of a widget library. After the text input cell and scrolling window it’s basically dumb geometry/drawing code all along.
      • vineyardmike 2y ago
        Flutter has its own language (Dart) which I suspect is included in these stats.
        • brabel 2y ago
          The Dart team is separate from the Flutter team, though they do interact as Flutter is now the primary use of Dart and as such, influences what is worked on in the Dart team.
      • DeathArrow 2y ago
        It's much harder to to implement a language in a proper way than writing a widget library. But that hardness comes from the level of knowledge one must have in different fields such as compiler theory, cathegory theory, hardware, beside classical computer science and coding. To write a widget library you just have to know how to code and have some experience. That being said, the amount of work for implementing a widget library might be higher, but is less qualified work being done. I dabbled in computer language theory and compilers and it's hard. I have no issues reading source code for widget and GUI libraries.
• crossroadsguy 2y ago
  I wish it was just native platforms. Someone needs a faster development and reaching the customers, just use web-views and then bring on native when you have the money, developers, and users. Interacting with non-native apps has consistently been a subpar experience without fail. I'd rather put my money behind KMP by JetBrains. It has a more streamlines, practical, and consistent future than flutter, react native et al.
• polemic 2y ago
  > We're forking Flutter. This is why. Cripes I wish people would explain who "we" is. "Flutter Foundation"? Which is "Flock" but not "Flutter"?
• owens99 2y ago
  I invested quite a bit of time working in Flutter years ago. The team overpromised and underdelivered. Felt like it was all marketing fluff and I'd been duped.
• yas_hmaheshwari 2y ago
  A tangential question: For someone looking to start using React Native (targeting both Android and iOS), is Flutter a viable alternative in 2024 ?
• nnurmanov 2y ago
  Instead of forking popular libs, someone should think how to improve OSS model. I think it is wrong when projects with 1mln users are not self sustained
• owaislone 2y ago
  Sounds like Flutter core teams hold contributors to a high standard and the Javascript bros can't deal with real Software Engineering so they're having a party of their own. In all honesty, good luck. It might be useful if it never breaks compatibility with Flutter.
• deleted 2y ago
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• DeathArrow 2y ago
  This is a kind of a strange argument: >How large is the Flutter team, today? Google doesn't publish this information, but my guess is that the team is about 50 people strong. >That's 50 people serving the needs of 1,000,000. Doing a little bit of division, that means that every single member of the Flutter team is responsible for the needs of 20,000 Flutter developers! It's like claiming that the inventor of penicillin, was responsible for billions of people who took pennicilin.
  • __rito__ 2y ago
    Wrong analogy. It's claiming that people who produce penicillin, are responsible for billions of people who take penicillin. That's a fair claim.
• DeathArrow 2y ago
  I would love Swift to be forked so it becomes more usable outside of Apple's ecosystem.
  • cellularmitosis 2y ago
    What would you change at the language level?
    • DeathArrow 2y ago
      Not at the language level but at library and framework level.
      • cellularmitosis 2y ago
        No need to fork Swift to accomplish that.
  • rererereferred 2y ago
    Isn't swift already cross platform? https://git.aparoksha.dev/aparoksha/adwaita-swift https://git.aparoksha.dev/aparoksha/adwaita-swift Or do you mean the UI Apple uses on top of swift?
• DeathArrow 2y ago
  The thing I dislike about Dart and some other language like Swift or Ruby is that they only have one application. With Dart you write Flutter aps. With Swift you write iOS apps. With Ruby you write Rails apps. Java, C#, Rust, C, C++, Go, Python are usable for more than one thing. I am not saying Dart and Flutter aren't nice, but for sure I would love to see Dart extending to more than just Flutter and making Dart usable for more would be an initiative I would applaud.
  • cryptos 2y ago
    I'd like it the other way around and want to see Flutter APIs for other languages (lets say Kotlin). Personally I feel no desire to learn Dart to use it only for Flutter.
  • skrebbel 2y ago
    Ruby is exactly as versatile as all those other languages you list. It was made before Rails was, and it can do everything eg Python can. It's not very popular anymore outside Rails but eg lots of people did APIs in Ruby using stuff like Sinatra. I personally did lots of CLI utilities in Ruby. It's really nice for stuff like that.
    • kreetx 2y ago
      Ruby has plenty of other applications written in it, it definitely doesn't belong to the "one app" language list.
    • mrbombastic 2y ago
      Yeah not sure why this is downvoted it is true, a lot of the open source tooling for ios is built in ruby and plenty of people build scripts and cli tools in ruby.
  • Alifatisk 2y ago
    The Dart community tries to extend itself outside Flutter, there’s Serverpod for backend development for example. It’s the Dart Team that is focused on Flutter.
  • 2y ago
• wg0 2y ago
  Our industry has few innovative ideas in past decades ranging from small to large. Rust, React, Tailwind, Typescript, Nix come to mind. All these did things differently enough to seem weird at first. Flutter is hands down the best DX product with a beautiful language. It is modern Qt and destined for great success given it doesn't get sent to Google's graveyard. As for the fork, I don't see anyway it not significantly diverging from upstream because bug fixes might involve refactoring which would make difficult to pull in upstream changes.
• jillesvangurp 2y ago
  > sadly, trying to work with the Flutter team delivers a different reality. While some developers have had success working with the Flutter team, many other developers have found it frustrating, if not unworkable. This is what's wrong with companies trying to do OSS. They are literally unable to get over themselves and tap into the one quality that makes OSS so worthwhile: tapping into third parties volunteering their time, creativity, and ideas. The need to tightly control direction and strategy of a project leads to companies putting up walls that make it hard to tap into this. IMHO, Google made several mistakes with Flutter that stem from their "not invented here syndrome". Effectively they've been competing with their own people on things like Kotlin, Kotlin multiplatform, and now Compose Multiplatform which is emerging as a direct competitor to flutter (does the same things on the same platforms). The obvious move years ago would have been to open up the flutter platform to other languages than Dart (especially Kotlin) and share code across both ecosystems and make the combined solution a better one. That never happened. Dart is alright but in the end it's just another Java/Kotlin like language. IMHO Kotlin is nicer. But that's just me. Interoperability between Swift and Kotlin native now exists on IOS. Compose works on IOS. But Dart-Kotlin interoperability is not a thing. This is not some kind of oversight. This is so obvious that it must have been proposed, multiple times, and blocked by Google management for internal political reasons. I have no other explanation. Any technical blocking issues would have been fixable/addressable. They chose not to. And now Flutter is de-prioritized internally and the team reduced in size because Google created another dead end. This is self inflicted failure. It took an outside team from Jetbrains to take Jetpack Compose and turn it into the multi-platform solution it is now becoming. A foundation with a fork is the right move. Fix the above and great stuff might happen. Google doing things alone isn't working for them. Repeatedly. They need outside help. It's there for the taking. They should not fight this foundation but back it with money and transfer the entire flutter team to it.
• pritambarhate 2y ago
  A lot of people here are comparing Flutter with programming languages like Python, PHP, etc. It shows how under appreciated UI development is and the amount of complexity UI developers need to handle. Also UI framework developers are always at the mercy of someone else when it comes to their destiny, unlike programming language creators which "almost" control it fully. Apple, Google, MS all keep changing their OS and browser behaviours all the time and cross platform devs need to adapt to those things continuously.
  • deleted 2y ago
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• openplatypus 2y ago
  [flagged]
  • pvg 2y ago
    Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
• monooso 2y ago
  > That's 50 people serving the needs of 1,000,000. Doing a little bit of division, that means that every single member of the Flutter team is responsible for the needs of 20,000 Flutter developers! Given that you could probably make a similar assertion about any popular framework, this doesn't strike me as particularly relevant.
• openrisk 2y ago
  how are Ubuntu's Flutter integration plans evolving these days? https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/refreshing-the-ubuntu-desktop-installer/20659 https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/refreshing-the-ubuntu-desktop...
• Alifatisk 2y ago
  The most important thing I wish this doesn't cause is to divide the community, but the article addresses this. I enjoy Flutter a lot, it would be very sad if it got discontinued. An previous employee at Flutter just showcased how powerful the framework can be outside it's main usage. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fU6d81MurTQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fU6d81MurTQ
• thiht 2y ago
  > How many Flutter developers exist in the world, today? My guess is that it's on the order of 1,000,000 developers. I have a hard time taking this number seriously, that sounds grossly exaggerated. Are there parts of the world where people actually use Flutter? Even their showcase is pretty light and a bit deceptive.
  • pritambarhate 2y ago
    In India Flutter is quite popular. But I also doubt there will be professional 1M flutter devs our there. However if we include students and hobbyists, then definitely there could be a 1M Flutter devs out there.
  • lukepighetti 2y ago
    Flutter is weak in North America but extremely strong in LatAm / Europe / India / Africa
  • kbcool 2y ago
    It's probably within an order of magnitude but it's really just hobbyists, casuals and indies using it. If you compare it to React Native there probably are more Flutter apps published but if you drill down into the top 1000 on each app store you would be lucky to find more than a few in most countries using Flutter whereas React Native definitely makes up more than 10%, maybe as high as 30% of non-game apps. I know on my phone I have zero Flutter based apps installed and almost 20% use React Native in some way. Source: I'm an app developer so I keep an eye on these things.
• 123sereusername 2y ago
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• 123sereusername 2y ago
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• ototot 2y ago
  I believe this kind of issues happen in Google everywhere. Not sure who to blame for, but it’s definitely a severe crisis Google is facing. Google should spend time fixing it.
• troelsbjerre 2y ago
  There are 27.4k forks of the flutter repo. This is just yet another one.
  • Alifatisk 2y ago
    Lots of forks are just forks, no changes or they turned stale. Some people fork for no reason, I think it's their way to show appreciation? Idk.
• jmull 2y ago
  I think a big problem is that Flutter's approach is very labor intensive. It takes over responsibility for the UI, which is tough when you want to be cross-platform. You need to keep up with the native UI across all the platforms. (Or, of course, you don't, in which case there are gaps, bugs, inconsistency, jank, etc.) Beyond the UI, it needs to offer integration with platform services and conventions, which is another perpetual treadmill. Not to mention it includes a dedicated language, which takes significant effort in its own right. Add to that, that as a project gets larger and more complicated, it becomes harder to change and tech debt builds up. It's not surprising to me issues are building up. I've got to wonder if a fork, while it can move forward in one respect, may just be adding more complexity in a project that already has too much. It wouldn't surprise me if Flutter's unmanaged complexity is exponential, in which case quadrupling the number of dedicated engineers won't move the needle a lot.
  • CharlesW 2y ago
    > You need to keep up with the native UI across all the platforms. (Or, of course, you don't, in which case there are gaps, bugs, inconsistency, jank, etc.) And for the latter, the result is something that mostly does what web-based solutions do (with well-understood downsides), only with virtually no ecosystem in comparison. I do think there are opportunities for cross-platform native development solutions like https://skip.tools/ https://skip.tools/, which offer an alternative to React Native.
• firemelt 2y ago
  so we cant sent a pr to flutter or what? I always thought flutter is open source
  • Alifatisk 2y ago
    > I always thought flutter is open source It is, this has nothing to do with that. The argument here is that PRs doesn't get merged easily, which Flock want to ease on
• phplovesong 2y ago
  With SwiftUI the gains Flutter had (on ios) are diminished. Flutter was way better than ObjC and the nasty layout thing ios apps had before, but today swiftui is really good.
• nprateem 2y ago
  > If every capable Flutter framework contributor in the world regularly contributed to Flutter, that ratio of 1:20,000 would drop to 1:1,000. LOL. That's how to get any investor to stop taking you seriously. "The global market for x is $$$bn. If we can just get 5% then..." How do they plan to get anywhere near 100% of potential developers working on it? Most of us here could work on any number of projects, but we don't.
• sillyboi 2y ago
  It would be great to make good flutter support for embedded devices