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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 Go
by 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 agoAre there any statistics on how much of it is used in production?
- blinding-streak 2y agoOther anecdotal apps: Google Analytics mobile app. BetRivers online sportsbook (one of the largest in the US).
- pzo 2y agoIf 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 agoI 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 agoI 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.
- manmal 2y agoI‘ve worked for over a year, almost full time, on an internal Flutter app that never saw the light of day (maybe later, if the stars align). Many apps just get their support section revamped with Flutter because there’s no need for that to look fancy; but they‘ll still count against that quota. Many devs prototype their side projects with Flutter, but never release them. Etc
- distances 2y agoI'm pretty sure many/most professional app developers are in long-term projects, working on the same app(s) year after year. So for those devs the app count never goes up. That's at least my experience -- development work only stops when the app is pulled off the stores for business reasons.
- eseidel 2y agohttps://flutter.dev/showcase https://flutter.dev/showcase has a few examples. Flutter is everywhere at this point. TikTok in China (Douyin), PUBG Mobile, MGM Resorts, eBay Motors, Kijiji.com, Grab are a few off the top of my head. And of course a whole bunch of Google apps (GPay, Earth, Classroom, etc.), Toyota cars, LG TVs, Google's own hardware devices, etc. Tonal is probably the app I used most often that's Flutter. Caribou Coffee, Betterment, Norwegian Cruise Lines, NuBank, Realtor.com are other random apps I've used that are Flutter.
- xster 2y agosmall nit: many daily driver apps in China are partially Flutter. But TikTok is not at the present
- refulgentis 2y agosmall nit: douyin is. is it possible you read "TikTok in China (Douyin)" as "TikTok in America"?
- Vt71fcAqt7 2y agoDo you have a source for that claim? I'm pretty sure that is incorrect. Bytedance has said they use Flutter but for other projects.[0] Douyin is not mentioned anywhere. [0] https://flutter.dev/showcase/bytedance https://flutter.dev/showcase/bytedance
- refulgentis 2y agoYes, via the Flutter founder here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41975474 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41975474
- eseidel 2y agoI don't have access to any devices with Douyin on it, so I cannot confirm current usage. My knowledge of their usage is from discussions with ByteDance some many years ago when I was in charge of the Flutter project at Google. At the time they were using Flutter in 50+ applications (probably most of them internal), including Douyin (TikTok for China) as well as physical hardware kiosks on their campus, web apps, etc. https://flutter.dev/showcase/bytedance https://flutter.dev/showcase/bytedance
- flawn 2y agoIf you have an Android phone, get FlutterShark and check which of your installed apps use Flutter. It's a surprising amount actually. For example, I just recently discovered that Supercell uses Flutter for their Supercell-ID flow.
- kgeist 2y agoFlutterShurk says 3 apps on my phone use Flutter. Device Info (a different app) reports that's 0.2% of all my apps...
- sundarurfriend 2y agoIt was 8 out of 86 apps for me (9% of my apps). Including Hacki, the HN client. It's a good variety of apps too, from big billion dollar companies to tiny games I downloaded from F-Droid.
- distances 2y agoInteresting to check, thanks for the tip. I have 6 Flutter apps, half of which I had assumed to be in React Native.
- kernal 2y agoI had about 30 apps. That surprised me.
- no_carrier 2y agoI have a pretty limited understanding of mobile sandboxing, but how does FlutterShark have access to analyse all the apps on my phone?
- gfarah 2y agoI can share an example from our company’s experience: - 5 years using Flutter - 31 full-time devs - 3 platforms (iOS, Android, and Web) - 1.3 million monthly active users Overall, we’re very happy with our decision to use Flutter
- 999900000999 2y agoThank you for creating my favorite app framework. That said, I literally only use Flutter as a hobbyist. I made a basic web game for a friend, and a small web app that helps me manage my music lyric videos. I ultimately picked Flutter because I find it easier than actually building websites. Dart is amazing. But I'm not deploying to millions of users. At most 10 people have seen my Flutter apps. It's VERY good for creating quick crud apps with Firebase. Just counting the number of us who have it installed and might of spun up hello world says nothing about it's actual market share. To be clear, I absolutely love Flutter, but it's still not something I really see job listings for. Dart is great too BTW.
- refulgentis 2y agoon behalf of one of the Flutter founders, thank you for the thank yous. I bet they'd mean a bit more if it wasn't coupled to a lengthy thinking-out-loud post that casts doubt on it, based on how many job listings you see, for something you don't look for job listings for. Quick Google shows Dart 10th, right below SQL, right above Kotlin. https://www.devjobsscanner.com/blog/top-8-most-demanded-programming-languages/ https://www.devjobsscanner.com/blog/top-8-most-demanded-prog...
- davedx 2y ago0.58% of jobs?
- refulgentis 2y agoIf you think its not popular until that increases past one of: JS, Python, Java, C#, PHP, C/C++, Ruby, Go, or SQL...I don't really know what to say. :)
- ignoramous 2y agoFlutter in Kotlin instead of Dart would have killed! Alas. Hopefully, Kotlin Multi-Platform holds up as good as Flutter has (the rendering architecture based on Skia seems similar between the two frameworks).
- openplatypus 2y agoWait, did you just publicly admit to Google collecting terminal device information without user consent?
- professor_x 2y agoIts not the coolest thing but idk if it’s unexpected or scandalous