11 ms·

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.
    - lysace 2y ago
      100k seems more reasonable.
  - kllrnohj 2y ago
    Flutter has more usage among professional devs than React Native does per stackoverflow survey https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2023/#section-most-popular-technologies-other-frameworks-and-libraries https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2023/#section-most-popular-t... and statista has similar-enough numbers: https://www.statista.com/statistics/869224/worldwide-software-developer-working-hours/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/869224/worldwide-softwar... Seeing as React Native has somewhere around 1 million active developers, Flutter almost certainly does as well.
- adamc 2y ago
  Just looked via google, and while no one really knows, common estimates of the number of web developers seem higher than that, on the order of 27 million. Your point may still be valid, but... is 3-5% really that high? (No dog in this, I'm not doing web development at the moment, although I have and probably will again.)
e63f67dd-065b 2y ago
There's 200k weekly downloads of node on npm. A million flutter devs means that there's a comparable amount of node devs to flutter. I'm not sure how else to estimate it, but there's 170k github stars of flutter compared to 100k node, and a roughly equal amount of forks. The 2024 SO dev survey https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2024/technology/ https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2024/technology/ has flutter at 10% and nodejs at 40%. Github language stats has JS about 10-15x the popularity of dart, but seeing as JS is more than just node it might pan out. https://madnight.github.io/githut/#/pull_requests/2024/1 https://madnight.github.io/githut/#/pull_requests/2024/1 So I guess looking at the stats 1M flutter devs is not an implausible number on its face.
- notpushkin 2y ago
  > There's 200k weekly downloads of node on npm. I’m pretty sure Node developers usually don’t install Node from npm.
  - monocasa 2y ago
    Does nvm not use npm internally?
    - pzo 2y ago
      Github shows 98% of code is "Shell" on top of that there are also many different package managers that people use: fnm, volta that are build with rust. You can also install nodejs using homebrew.
    - ramesh31 2y ago
      >Does nvm not use npm internally? No. It downloads binaries from nodejs.org. There is no "official" canonical means of managing Node versions. It's just a grab bag of community tools like NVM.
    - nicce 2y ago
      I would dare to say that average person who works with Node does not use nvm.
eseidel 2y ago
Flutter founder here. When I led the Google team we had pretty good analytics. `flutter` was for a long time opt-out with analytics and would phone home to Google and report usage. We filtered out docker containers and things that looked like CI and saw usage near 1M monthly actives when I left Google a couple years ago. I'm sure it's up since then. There are 10s of millions of web developers in the world. Doesn't shock me that Flutter could be over 1M monthly (and probably several million annually). There are just a lot of apps and app devs out there.
- punduk 2y ago
  Are there any statistics on how much of it is used in production?
  - blinding-streak 2y ago
    Other anecdotal apps: Google Analytics mobile app. BetRivers online sportsbook (one of the largest in the US).
  - pzo 2y ago
    If there would be 1M flutter devs per year and on average team had 10 devs (rather rare most mobile teams would be smaller except really big apps) and development of app would take ~1 year you would expect minimum 100k new flutter apps in app store every year. That seems highly unlikely.
    - punduk 2y ago
      I agree. Flutter is a project I like, but the numbers given regarding statistics remind me of this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A-RfHC91Ewc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A-RfHC91Ewc
    - plorkyeran 2y ago
      I suspect there's a lot of larger apps out there which use Flutter for one feature or set of screens but the majority of the app isn't written in Flutter. You could have a team of 100 working on a app where only three of them actually touch flutter on a regular basis, but depending on how exactly you capture analytics all 100 of them may get counted.
markus_zhang 2y ago
It's possible that they also count students and amateurs such as me, who only used it in a small project never published. There could be a million I guess, but professional developers are probably a lot less.
- vivekd 2y ago
  I think this is a strong possibility. For example, I don't work in programing and don't intend to ever work in the field. I do it as a hobby. I downloaded flutter, played around with it for a few weekends and decided it wasn't for me. If you go solely by number of downloads I would be counted as a 'flutter developer'
breck 2y ago
Wow, I had seen signs that Flutter was something special for years, but hadn't checked in a while. Some relevant data: - Over 165K GH stars - Over 140K subredditers - Over 500K YouTube subscribers The 1M estimate is at least ballpark accurate. https://pldb.io/concepts/flutter.html https://pldb.io/concepts/flutter.html
- fastball 2y ago
  Does subscribing to a coffee-tuber automatically make you a barista?
  - DaiPlusPlus 2y ago
    James Hoffman, I presume? I don’t sub him on YouTube - but I’m not lying when I say everyone I know IRL who does sub his channel has worked as a barista at some point in their lives (…and purchase actual chemical-lab supplies for their coffee brews).
zippergz 2y ago
My experience when I last looked into Flutter was that it was heavily used in India - at least based on who participates in the community online - and much less elsewhere. That's not a value judgement, just might be a factor in why you don't hear much about it if you're not in India.

I was wondering the same. How many Android developers are there?!

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.
  - lysace 2y ago
    100k seems more reasonable.
- kllrnohj 2y ago
  Flutter has more usage among professional devs than React Native does per stackoverflow survey https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2023/#section-most-popular-technologies-other-frameworks-and-libraries https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2023/#section-most-popular-t... and statista has similar-enough numbers: https://www.statista.com/statistics/869224/worldwide-software-developer-working-hours/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/869224/worldwide-softwar... Seeing as React Native has somewhere around 1 million active developers, Flutter almost certainly does as well.
adamc 2y ago
Just looked via google, and while no one really knows, common estimates of the number of web developers seem higher than that, on the order of 27 million. Your point may still be valid, but... is 3-5% really that high? (No dog in this, I'm not doing web development at the moment, although I have and probably will again.)

e63f67dd-065b 2y ago

There's 200k weekly downloads of node on npm. A million flutter devs means that there's a comparable amount of node devs to flutter. I'm not sure how else to estimate it, but there's 170k github stars of flutter compared to 100k node, and a roughly equal amount of forks. The 2024 SO dev survey https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2024/technology/ https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2024/technology/ has flutter at 10% and nodejs at 40%. Github language stats has JS about 10-15x the popularity of dart, but seeing as JS is more than just node it might pan out. https://madnight.github.io/githut/#/pull_requests/2024/1 https://madnight.github.io/githut/#/pull_requests/2024/1 So I guess looking at the stats 1M flutter devs is not an implausible number on its face.

notpushkin 2y ago
> There's 200k weekly downloads of node on npm. I’m pretty sure Node developers usually don’t install Node from npm.
- monocasa 2y ago
  Does nvm not use npm internally?
  - pzo 2y ago
    Github shows 98% of code is "Shell" on top of that there are also many different package managers that people use: fnm, volta that are build with rust. You can also install nodejs using homebrew.
  - ramesh31 2y ago
    >Does nvm not use npm internally? No. It downloads binaries from nodejs.org. There is no "official" canonical means of managing Node versions. It's just a grab bag of community tools like NVM.
  - nicce 2y ago
    I would dare to say that average person who works with Node does not use nvm.

eseidel 2y ago

Flutter founder here. When I led the Google team we had pretty good analytics. `flutter` was for a long time opt-out with analytics and would phone home to Google and report usage. We filtered out docker containers and things that looked like CI and saw usage near 1M monthly actives when I left Google a couple years ago. I'm sure it's up since then. There are 10s of millions of web developers in the world. Doesn't shock me that Flutter could be over 1M monthly (and probably several million annually). There are just a lot of apps and app devs out there.

punduk 2y ago
Are there any statistics on how much of it is used in production?
- blinding-streak 2y ago
  Other anecdotal apps: Google Analytics mobile app. BetRivers online sportsbook (one of the largest in the US).
- pzo 2y ago
  If there would be 1M flutter devs per year and on average team had 10 devs (rather rare most mobile teams would be smaller except really big apps) and development of app would take ~1 year you would expect minimum 100k new flutter apps in app store every year. That seems highly unlikely.
  - punduk 2y ago
    I agree. Flutter is a project I like, but the numbers given regarding statistics remind me of this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A-RfHC91Ewc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A-RfHC91Ewc
  - plorkyeran 2y ago
    I suspect there's a lot of larger apps out there which use Flutter for one feature or set of screens but the majority of the app isn't written in Flutter. You could have a team of 100 working on a app where only three of them actually touch flutter on a regular basis, but depending on how exactly you capture analytics all 100 of them may get counted.

markus_zhang 2y ago

It's possible that they also count students and amateurs such as me, who only used it in a small project never published. There could be a million I guess, but professional developers are probably a lot less.

vivekd 2y ago
I think this is a strong possibility. For example, I don't work in programing and don't intend to ever work in the field. I do it as a hobby. I downloaded flutter, played around with it for a few weekends and decided it wasn't for me. If you go solely by number of downloads I would be counted as a 'flutter developer'

breck 2y ago

Wow, I had seen signs that Flutter was something special for years, but hadn't checked in a while. Some relevant data: - Over 165K GH stars - Over 140K subredditers - Over 500K YouTube subscribers The 1M estimate is at least ballpark accurate. https://pldb.io/concepts/flutter.html https://pldb.io/concepts/flutter.html

fastball 2y ago
Does subscribing to a coffee-tuber automatically make you a barista?
- DaiPlusPlus 2y ago
  James Hoffman, I presume? I don’t sub him on YouTube - but I’m not lying when I say everyone I know IRL who does sub his channel has worked as a barista at some point in their lives (…and purchase actual chemical-lab supplies for their coffee brews).

zippergz 2y ago

My experience when I last looked into Flutter was that it was heavily used in India - at least based on who participates in the community online - and much less elsewhere. That's not a value judgement, just might be a factor in why you don't hear much about it if you're not in India.