We're forking Flutter

https://flutterfoundation.dev/blog/posts/we-are-forking-flutter-this-is-why/

by alexzeitler • 2 years ago

853 712 2 years ago

flutterfoundation.dev

arccy• 2 years ago

To still use flutter in the name when your project is called flock seems beyond misleading.

throwaway199723• 2 years ago

Better than using a distinct name for a mostly-identical project or effort (looking at you, MariaDB).

concerndc1tizen3• 2 years ago

"MariaDB is named after Widenius' younger daughter, Maria. (MySQL is named after his other daughter, My.)" (Wikipedia)

SahAssar• 2 years ago

Are you suggesting that they should have used a name that might lead Oracle to sue them instead of being clearly differentiated?

topspin• 2 years ago

Also, there is an existing messaging and collaboration tool called Flock: https://www.flock.com/

mhd• 2 years ago

My onions, let me show you them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flock_(web_browser)

ClassyJacket4• 2 years ago

And a fantastic way to get sued out of existence by a rich corporation.

quesera• 2 years 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.

normie30004• 2 years 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?

michaelmior3• 2 years 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• 2 years 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.

mvac2• 2 years 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.

normie30004• 2 years ago

There have been similar projects based on technologies that Microsoft has killed

Isn't flutter from google?

michaelmior3• 2 years ago

Yes. But the other technologies mentioned were from Microsoft.

mvac2• 2 years ago

Yes, it is. I was just thinking about what happened when other companies did something similar.

baueric• 2 years ago

That might be the wrong way to interpret this. It actually validates interest in the framework. This change personally excited me and injects some change into the ecosystem that could result in a better future.

kernal5• 2 years ago

Very sad article to read. I just expect the original Flutter will now die a slow death.

I find it odd that you would think this fork would even have an impact on Flutter or its roadmap.

riku_iki2• 2 years 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• 2 years ago

Based on the article's premise getting that merged is the problem, not fixing code.

riku_iki2• 2 years ago

right, making maintainers happy is part of that work.

rubiquity• 2 years ago

They estimate there are one million Flutter developers/users. Have I been sleeping under a rock?

normie30004• 2 years ago

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

yieldcrv• 2 years 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• 2 years 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• 2 years ago

Assuming there are 20 million software engineers in the world writing code professionally, 1 million Flutter developers seems massively optimistic.

lysace2• 2 years 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.

adamc2• 2 years 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• 2 years 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/ 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

So I guess looking at the stats 1M flutter devs is not an implausible number on its face.

notpushkin2• 2 years ago

There's 200k weekly downloads of node on npm.

I’m pretty sure Node developers usually don’t install Node from npm.

spankalee• 2 years ago

I use Node every day and I've never even heard of the 'node' package before. I think it's very niche.

eseidel10• 2 years 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.

punduk3• 2 years ago

Are there any statistics on how much of it is used in production?

9999000009995• 2 years ago

Thank 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.

openplatypus• 2 years ago

Wait, did you just publicly admit to Google collecting terminal device information without user consent?

markus_zhang2• 2 years 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• 2 years 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• 2 years 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

fastball• 2 years ago

Does subscribing to a coffee-tuber automatically make you a barista?

zippergz2• 2 years 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.

justmarc4• 2 years 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.

normie30004• 2 years 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?

justmarc4• 2 years 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.

ko27• 2 years 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-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

conradfr• 2 years ago

Ionic&Capacitor with Angular/React/Vue

NativeScript

atentaten• 2 years ago

I've been working with Flutter for a little over 2 years nonstop. Before I started this project, knowing enough react, I experimented with react native, Expo, also quasar, capacitor, nativescript, and other cross-platform mobile solutions. Flutter/Dart was just nicer to deal with than everything else. I needed to work with C code too, and Flutter made it straightforward with FFI.

The developer experience was great and the Flutter team was very responsive with questions I asked.

hadad2• 2 years ago

For xplat is same concept, compile to native code on multiple target system.

The other xplat framework same as Flutter:

- React Native

- Kotlin Multiplatform

- NET MAUI

- NativeScript

- Slint

politelemon2• 2 years 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• 2 years 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• 2 years 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• 2 years 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-...

eseidel10• 2 years ago

Flutter Founder here. If you ever have any concerns re: Flutter, please don't ever hesitate to reach out. eric@shorebird.dev

ignoramous6• 2 years ago

Flutter Founder here.

Flutter was a company acquired ala Firebase? Always thought it was a project (like Golang) incubated by/for/at Google.

evomassiny• 2 years ago

I've nothing to add to the conversation, but I jump on this oportinity to tell you that i like the content you've made with Adam Barth on yt very much, have a great day :)

plorkyeran2• 2 years 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.

bsimpson2• 2 years 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…

kgeist4• 2 years 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.

johnnyanmac2• 2 years 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.

adamc2• 2 years ago

Even though they didn't say, that was my assumption. Why would they bother, otherwise? And that's not wrong.

giancarlostoro4• 2 years ago

WhatsApp had less than 50 engineers (or was it employees total?) when Facebook bought them out, and they had millions of users.

droideqa• 2 years ago

The power of Erlang.

izacus2• 2 years ago

What a bizarre comparison, WhatsApp engineers didn't have to review code for millions of users.

steve_adams_86• 2 years ago

WhatsApp has a very narrow use case and feature set to support. Flutter is a multi-platform framework for developing apps like WhatsApp. It seems like a apples and oranges here.

igorguerrero• 2 years ago

We got around 3m with seven guys, so yeah, and we don't even have on-call rotation / schedule, even though emergencies do happen from time to time. They think 1:1000 ratio is too big as well? That's crazy.

mike_hearn2• 2 years ago

Are you comparing a developer platform to consumer software there? Dev platforms have radically different support costs to regular SaaS or mobile apps. Developers are really support intense.

mdhb4• 2 years ago

Yeah, the person primarily behind this is a bit of an oddball in my experience who had a somewhat contentious relationship with the team which he himself was once a part of and it’s not clear if he left or was asked to leave.

But reading that post I couldn’t help but shake the feeling that there might be other non disclosed reasons for the fork because some of the ones he did give as you pointed out didn’t make a lot of sense to me either.

LauraMedia• 2 years ago

I generally agree, the fact that the project relies on Google's internal steering is the much bigger factor in this to me.

There is no guarantee these 50 devs can actually focus on Flutter, instead they might get looped in in the internal race to AI products.

mdhb4• 2 years ago

I mean we do actually have many years of real life experience at this point of how they perform in the real world.

I’ve never actually come across a better maintained project personally. It is incredibly thoughtfully developed with a high level of attention to detail who have successfully shipped a huge number of major improvements in ways that made sense.

There is a premise in the post that implies Flutter is poorly maintained and that’s just not a commonly held belief by the community at all.

As I hinted to in another comment the particular person behind this is a bit of an oddball and I think there may be other reasons that drove this decision in the first place in addition to the ones he gave in the post which for the record I’m sure there are some things he wishes were prioritised differently but this fork seems kind of very “him” rather than a popular position that people were begging for.

fhdsgbbcaA5• 2 years ago

50 people is a pretty huge team at Google to start with, there’s teams of <5 that support weird bits of core infrastructure that serve billions of users an hour.

EGreg3• 2 years ago

Exaggeration?

Billions per HOUR seems quite a stretch there..

wg03• 2 years ago

Common misconception is that you open source something and contributions will flock in. Doesn't happen that way.

And even if happens - changes can't be merged without thorough and careful review. So who's do the reviews when supposedly there are too many contributors? Only someone who fully understands that particular subsystem.

Which means we're back to square one because as per post there are only three subject matter experts available for the new fork.

iamleppert• 2 years ago

It absolutely reads this way, and this person is in for a rude awakening. I thought all the Flutter team was laid off from Google anyways, effectively making this project dead in the water. Looks like there is a someone left over that can't let it go and just move on from the past.

sulam• 2 years ago

You’re most likely confusing Flutter with the Python team which was laid off but the work moved to a team in Germany. The Flutter team has not been laid off to my knowledge.

punduk3• 2 years 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_zhang2• 2 years 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?

sgt2• 2 years 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.

eseidel10• 2 years 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-12• 2 years 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?

sgt2• 2 years ago

:shrug:

Is it time for HN to finally support Slack-style emojis?

bsimpson2• 2 years ago

needs of the community

The constant question of big tech OSS is who is it for/why does it exist? Did they make this because they think it's a useful tool internally, or are they trying to build a platform for external developers? If they built it because it's internally useful, then it's probably open-sourced for cultural reasons (the people working on it are used to being in open source communities and want to share what they're working on).

Unless something is specifically being made as a platform for external developers (Android and Firebase come to mind), the level of support you'll get is at the whims of the team's current product leadership and budget. Both of those things change over time - a product manager can always say "let's focus on internal developers" and put the external community in maintenance mode. Based on the article's mention of desktop support being deprioritized, this might have happened on Flutter.

Big tech funds things that would be really hard to pull off with just volunteers, but big tech projects can also be victims to the capriciousness of corporate politics and budgeting.

skrebbel2• 2 years ago

Agree, if it pans out this way in reality of course. That'd be splendid!

NodeJS went through something similar. It was tightly controlled by a single company (Joyent) who were juggling too many balls, and progress went slowly. Community people did a fork (io.js) which shipped improvements faster, but they did so in a careful non-shitty way. This made lots of people switch to io.js, so that eventually NodeJS merged with io.js (iirc they just renamed the latest io.js "NodeJS").

I don't know of any other instances of community forks of company-controlled OSS that did something similar though. If this is just one guy who made a blog post, like a sibling comment suggests it might be, then it might not pan out this way.

croemer2• 2 years ago

Wouldn't it be good to launch with at least a few bugs fixes? The launch is a bit thin, just mirroring, nothing to offer?

maxrmk4• 2 years 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• 2 years 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.

kgeist4• 2 years ago

WhatsApp once had just 50 engineers with 900M users: https://www.wired.com/2015/09/whatsapp-serves-900-million-us...

KeplerBoy• 2 years 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.

maxrmk4• 2 years 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• 2 years ago

As far as I know Telegram has around the same number of engineers even today, handling around the same size userbase.

nostrademons• 2 years ago

Mythical Man Month applies to new product development, when you have a product you're trying to rush out the door that doesn't exist yet.

Once the project already exists, is largely feature-complete, and is mostly in the "fixing bugs and small annoyances" phase, then Linus's Law [1] takes over. Debugging is very much parallelizable, because you can generally fix the bug without generating major impact elsewhere in the codebase, and if you have a good test suite you'll know if your fix has broken other invariants elsewhere.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus%27s_law

munificent4• 2 years ago

Once the project already exists, is largely feature-complete

That may be a reachable state for a command-line oriented operating system itself a clone of an older operating system, but is likely unrealizable in any sort of system that is trying to be actively more innovative.

mostly in the "fixing bugs and small annoyances" phase

I don't know of any UI framework that has had the luxury of ever reaching that phase.

then Linus's Law [1] takes over.

If you maintain a widely used framework, I think the more meaningful eponymous law is Hyrum's: https://www.hyrumslaw.com/

This is probably the #1 source of friction for contributing to Flutter. It's not that the Flutter developers are overworked killjoys who don't value external contributors. It's that when, as the author of the blog post says, your codebase has a million users, it's really hard for a contribution to not end up breaking someone.

if you have a good test suite you'll know if your fix has broken other invariants elsewhere.

Sure, but the fix itself will still need tests. So now you've got to walk the contributor through the process of writing tests which is definitely not a skill that most software engineers have and is not particularly rewarding for an external contributor who already has a working fix and just wants their patch to be "done".

Fundamentally, coordinating thousands of people to make a single codebase used by millions of people is hard. There is no silver bullet. It's a miracle it works at all.

maxrmk4• 2 years ago

I thought linus had lost it for a second there, until I saw it's just named after him and not something he created. I generally disagree - I think that having many developers with a shallow understanding of the whole codebase scales less-than-linearly with the number of devs.

It's probably less actively harmful than new product development, but I'd still say a team of 50 is probably larger than is necessary for the amount of usage flutter gets.

p1necone• 2 years ago

Having a large number of devs spot fixing issues as they come up without a deep understanding of the codebase is how you turn a maintainable project into a mess.

com2kid2• 2 years ago

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 depends on an org's priorities and what gets put on someone's reviews.

During one of the years when I worked on Windows Mobile (before Windows Phone!) we had an objective handed down from on high that we were to spend so many hours a week on customer support forums helping people out.

Well, for that year, customers all around the web got great support right from engineers! I got to paste lots of positive feedback from end users in to my yearly review, and I felt great about it!

If Google cared about supporting Flutter as an Open Source project, they'd make the health of the open source project one of the measurements going into employee reviews at the end of the year.

maxrmk4• 2 years ago

Totally– This was in the early days of open source .net, when it was still called .net core. We had just moved onto GitHub and I don’t think microsoft had quite figured out how to manage that organizationally. There is a point of time there where the fastest way to reach an engineer was not to go through a tier one contract that you pay microsoft millions of dollars for, but instead to just open an issue on the GitHub. I doubt that’s the case anymore.

justin66• 2 years ago

The OP was talking about developers serving the needs of developers, and the ratio involved there. This is different than developers serving the needs of machines (fifty developers to some arbitrary number of machines is not automatically impressive) or developers serving the need of users. One would expect the ratios involved to be different for all three and highly context-specific.

cbb330• 2 years ago

Flutterfoundation.dev

Was created for flock?

This seems less of a fork and more of an attempted annex

textlapse• 2 years 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?

ClassyJacket4• 2 years 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.

eseidel10• 2 years 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

ivm• 2 years 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.

throwaway0320235• 2 years 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.

johnnyanmac2• 2 years 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.

throwaway0320235• 2 years 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.

concerndc1tizen3• 2 years ago

Who's "We're" ?

I only see a single name?

Is this just some dude with a blog?

snug• 2 years ago

1 developer supporting 1 developer, better ratio than Google

erichocean• 2 years ago

That's 50 people serving the needs of 1,000,000.

The SQLite developers must find this rationale hilarious.

Vt71fcAqt75• 2 years 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.

pzo9• 2 years 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.

xster6• 2 years ago

https://github.com/flutter/engine/blob/main/impeller/docs/fa... discusses the reasoning a bit. There's more of a difference in the approach

irq-12• 2 years ago

The build process for skia and its dependencies is huge. Flutter compiles (on windows) with CMake and Skia uses googles GN tool.

https://skia.org/docs/user/build/

https://gn.googlesource.com/gn

nmfisher• 2 years ago

As someone who has slowly been writing Dart/Flutter bindings for Filament[0] over the last couple of years, I agree the internal 3D engine was a bit of a strange choice of priorities.

[0] https://github.com/nmfisher/thermion

mannyv• 2 years ago

Hopefully this will turn into an EGCS-like situation.

peppertree• 2 years ago

The fork is called "flock" and it's part of "flutter foundation"? It appears they forked Google's confusing branding strategy as well.

pzo9• 2 years ago

wait for similar WordPress drama if google owns 'flutter' trademark.

zippergz2• 2 years ago

They do.

pjmlp2• 2 years ago

And so it slowly starts what everyone was expecting from Google projects that don't bring millions back home.

pzo9• 2 years 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/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

xster6• 2 years ago

https://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1714717681&count=1 is a sensible estimation

pzo9• 2 years 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.

KTibow• 2 years ago

Communication monoculture

This point seems like a callout to a certain discussion and I kind of want to see it

jonahx• 2 years 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!

skywhopper2• 2 years 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.

munificent4• 2 years 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• 2 years 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.

skywhopper2• 2 years 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 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.

eseidel10• 2 years 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/engine/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• 2 years 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?

skybrian3• 2 years 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• 2 years ago

What is google3?

JoelEinbinder• 2 years ago

Google's monorepo of closed source code.

gmoot• 2 years ago

Google's internal monorepo.

yonran• 2 years ago

Here is a paper describing google3 https://research.google/pubs/why-google-stores-billions-of-l..., which includes the policy that “To prevent dependency conflicts, as outlined earlier, it is important that only one version of an open source project be available at any given time.” More documentation on The One Version Rule for third_party: https://opensource.google/documentation/reference/thirdparty.... This rule may make it more difficult to upgrade a third_party library frequently since the maintainer of the third_party library has to test all the uses of the library from all teams, rather than each team deciding when to upgrade.

hobofan• 2 years ago

Yeah, this seems to be a common theme with Google's open source projects. Bazel feels very similar in many points.

It obviously wouldn't exist if not for Google putting resources towards it, but Google's (and google3's needs) are so significantly prioritized that it hurts the community. E.g. due to the low allocation of resources and extensive usage of rules_proto and bazel-skylib inside google3, they are completely ossified and the community has given up contributing to them and instead created either forks or contribution-friendly wrappers.

Degorath• 2 years ago

Couldn't flutter work as public-first that then gets vendored into third_party? Or is that literally the fork strategy you are talking about that I'm too dense to understand?

skybrian3• 2 years ago

Yeah, that's what I meant. Public-first is good in some ways, but it means some bugs might be discovered rather late.

xster6• 2 years ago

The main Flutter GitHub repo does have infrastructure to run PR against all Google internal tests (which as you say, does find real bugs). https://imgur.com/a/Ih2oQIS

disclaimer: my team runs said infrastructure

EngVagabond• 2 years ago

Does that automatically run against every PR? What mitigations did you have to put in place for Google security to allow running untrusted code from PRs on internal CI?

yencabulator• 2 years ago

when you have your own changes to work on that are more important to the team.

That part is the killer. Important to the Google Flutter team != important to the wider Flutter community.

skybrian3• 2 years ago

Or maybe it’s not important to the community either? Sometimes, a bug is pretty obscure and only important to the person who filed it. People will get annoyed if they aren’t investigated, though.

It’s good to be a little skeptical when people claim to speak for the community just because they’re part of the community. Often it’s not so.

1oooqooq5• 2 years ago

i avoid contributing to flutter because it feels like a google soon to be abandoned project.

hacks like not accepting tabs in any tools and using space indentation wrong on top of it. tools ignore parameters like port numbers just so it works better for Android studio very specific use case while bringing pain to any ci pipeline, etc.

jwildeboer• 2 years ago

How many people are the “we” this blog post talks about? 5 people? 500?

ckastner• 2 years 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.

Apocryphon2• 2 years ago

Should've gotten flockfoundation

gremlinsinc• 2 years ago

or idgaflock.com

croemer2• 2 years ago

Good chance that Google legal won't be happy and ask the website to be taken down. https://docs.flutter.dev/brand

appveyor• 2 years ago

Is there any way to contact project owners besides X "formerly Twitter"?

schnable• 2 years ago

What's the Flutter Foundation?

dadrian• 2 years ago

Raise rates.

macspoofing2• 2 years 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"?

echoangle2• 2 years 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.

ClassyJacket4• 2 years 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.

macspoofing2• 2 years 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• 2 years ago

more context on flutter layoffs: https://www.theregister.com/2024/04/29/google_python_flutter...

Alifatisk5• 2 years ago

The layoffs wasn’t Flutter specific, it happened across all orgs.

coffeeaddict1• 2 years 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.

1propionyl4• 2 years 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.

divan24• 2 years 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.

1propionyl4• 2 years 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.

divan24• 2 years 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?

LordDragonfang2• 2 years ago

As someone desperately fighting to keep their company's main product to stay using a native desktop UI, Microsoft makes it real hard. WinUI3 hasn't even officially launched and it already feels like it's on life support. QT is good, but even qt seems to be starting to use a web renderer.

epcoa10• 2 years ago

What's a native UI?

The only thing closeish to a native UI is macOS and iOS AppKit and UIKit. Winforms aka Win32 is still a thing, but Microsoft has been undogfooding that and putting out alternatives for years, now WinUI3 will definitely kill off Winforms for good! What is native on Linux? Gtk, Qt, Motif (lol)? And then Android? Ironic then that Google is the one behind Flutter.

The concept of native outside of MacOS/iOS is pretty busted at this point. At best it just means something non-web.

wiseowise9• 2 years ago

I don't know why cross platform UI has been such a hobbyhorse for so many for so long: it's a stupid idea.

You suggest to build and maintain same logic in at least C#/C++ + Swift + Kotlin + JS + C++ and you ask why crossplatform UI is a popular idea?

kernal5• 2 years ago

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

I agree with you that Flutter has been a boon for cross platform development, but to say it's impossible to tell you're using a Flutter app is a bit of an exaggeration. I have no problem identifying Flutter apps. Not that I care as they often have a genuinely nice UI and are performant.

dotancohen3• 2 years ago

Is the complete lack of accessibility still the giveaway? Last I looked Flutter was a complete nonstarter for accessibility.

ClassyJacket4• 2 years ago

How do you know this isn't the toupee fallacy?

You spotted a few correctly so you assume you always spot correctly - but there might be more you miss.

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Toupee_fallacyhttps://rational...

divan24• 2 years ago

How do you do that? I just opened my phone, and the last app I used was a food delivery app. How can I figure out if it's a Flutter app or a native one?

deergomoo6• 2 years ago

Most people don't realize how many apps written in Flutter they use daily, simply because it's impossible to tell

You can't be serious. Maybe on Android, but on other platforms—especially iOS—they stick out like a sore thumb.

A number of them just look like Material Design Android apps awkwardly transplanted over, but I know that's down to the developer so I won't hold that against Flutter. But scrolling through the Flutter showcase[0] and calling those apps up to look at screenshots on the App Store—none of them look like native iOS apps. They don't look bad (mostly), but they don't fit in.

Don't get me wrong, I don't expect anyone else to care or even notice. But for those of us that do care, you can absolutely tell.

[0] https://flutter.dev/showcase

divan24• 2 years ago

Sure, but not every cross-platform app developer wants their app to look "native to iOS". Especially if you want your app to look the same on all platforms and/or have some creative design.

divan24• 2 years ago

Flutter showcase is a disgrace, to be honest. Doesn't represent the actual landscape even remotely.

ForHackernews5• 2 years ago

I miss the days when applications had their own look and feel. If your idea of great design is identical rectangles to all the other apps, I guess Winforms solved that use case 20 years go.

ur-whale• 2 years ago

but they don't fit in.

You seem to say this like it's a bad thing?

lawgimenez2• 2 years ago

On Android you can also tell the way the list scrolls. Especially on devices, 2-3 years older.

p_l• 2 years ago

Just like a lot of the "web application packaged as mobile app" frameworks did in the past, except with ugly iOS styling that also completely mismatched the expected navigational patterns.

What's worse, there are new applications with custom look and feel that do the same navigational sins today

dwaite4• 2 years ago

but I know that's down to the developer so I won't hold that against Flutter.

That is absolutely an issue with Flutter, which throws away the underlying platform UX and draws to a canvas. It gives you relatively few tools to target "native look" controls for each platform without maintaining multiple UIs in parallel composed of entirely different widgets.

946789987649• 2 years ago

Sounds a bit like plastic surgery... you only notice the bad ones.

zaphirplane2• 2 years ago

Over time I have become convinced that the, fit in argument is not something that actual users care for.

The sometime subjective aesthetic reasoning doesn’t mean the application can’t succeed. office ribbon is an example

m3talsmith• 2 years ago

The developer could use the cupertino framework for iOS releases, but usually choose not to.

jamil72• 2 years ago

I noticed the SNCF Connect app for France's rail was using it in their showcase which explains why the scroll views are so weird and busted feeling. They still stutter on a new iPhone. As a native iOS developer I'm somewhat biased and a lot of people likely don't care but it still feels off to me even for apps that use a complete custom design. I hope they can optmise away those kind of issues more as it's IMO always better to have alternatives.

Side note: Is anyone using Flutter just for Android? I'm kind of tempted to try this as dealing with the Android build system and packaging is bit of a pain, despite Kotlin and Compose being quite nice.

jklinger410• 2 years ago

You can't be serious.

Please keep your comments civil

eternityforest5• 2 years ago

On non-mac platforms material is already everywhere so they mostly don't look too out of place.

Onavo• 2 years ago

Most people don't realize how many apps written in Flutter they use daily, simply because it's impossible to tell.

Flutter implemented its "native" looking UI widgets by literally having teams of designers eyeball the native designs and reimplementing, starting from drawPixel. This can't be done on a volunteer basis alone. Many open source attempts have tried this route and failed because they don't have the sheer designer resources needed to get there.

https://docs.flutter.dev/ui/widgets/cupertino

skydhash• 2 years ago

I’d much prefer they’ve gone with their own design system. People are already used to bespoke ones (web), badly done ones just remind me of scammy sites.

dwaite4• 2 years ago

Flutter implemented its "native" looking UI widgets by literally having teams of designers eyeball the native designs and reimplementing, starting from drawPixel.

Those widgets are then stylized wrong on every subsequent platform release, such that your iOS 18 phone might seem like it is launching an iOS 7 app.

IMHO if your goal is to have a cross-platform codebase act like the underlying platform, React Native is a much better approach. Flutter exists for people who don't intend to take on the effort of targeting platforms with specialized behaviors.

faizmokh• 2 years ago

having teams of designers eyeball the native designs

No wonder it's not accurate.

zachrip2• 2 years ago

Which flutter apps do I likely use?

reaperducer• 2 years ago

According to its web site, eBay, New York Times, Square, American Airlines.

sureglymop• 2 years ago

The only one I often use is Immich. It's laggy and at times freezes completely for a second.

I don't think that's the developers fault though, I don't have that issue with any other android app.

kelvinjps10• 2 years ago

Hacki a nice frontent for havkernews

nox101• 2 years ago

flutter's custom canvas render on web means so much of the web stops working or is slow. type anything non ASCII like an emoji or CKJ and eat while it downloads a font. No other pages do this. Text fields are missing all the standard context menu options like define, translate, etc... Things that would be selectable on any other page are not, etc....

wruza5• 2 years ago

This. They can have all the deviations they want, but “input core” must be native. If a framework ignores it, users will notice and frown upon it immediately.

When flutter came out publicly, first I thought no way it can get away with custom everything. But it turned out some developers don’t care about that at all.

chrismorgan4• 2 years ago

If you care about the web at all as a target, you must not use Flutter. It’s awful. They used to have a DOM renderer which you could use and everything would be fine, but apparently no one used it because it wasn’t perfect, and they’ve recently deprecated it and will remove it sooner or later—they’re doubling down on the pure-canvas direction where it’s completely impossible to produce a good result. And I do mean impossible, design limitations of the web platform that in some cases fundamentally cannot be relaxed and in others are very unlikely ever to be. With this direction, scrolling will never be good, text rendering will never be perfect, input and manipulation will never be acceptable, links will never work properly.

jwells899• 2 years ago

I can’t imagine using Flutter for desktop development if only because like most newer UI frameworks, it’s mobile focused and doesn’t come with important desktop widgets like tableviews/datagrids and treeviews.

loic-sharma2• 2 years ago

two_dimensional_scrollables is a first-party package by the Flutter team that implements table views and tree views: https://pub.dev/packages/two_dimensional_scrollables

divan24• 2 years ago

There are plenty, though, and they work amazingly well on desktop: https://pub.dev/packages/syncfusion_flutter_datagrid

satvikpendem28• 2 years ago

Canonical is contributing to desktop and is using Flutter for a lot of their desktop components now.

eternityforest5• 2 years ago

Tableviews are pretty niche and tree views mostly get used for files, so I'm fine not having either in apps that aren't about managing lots of data.

I like headers and sections more that tables for most things anyway.

crossroadsguy2• 2 years ago

Haha. Oh, most people know! They might not be knowing it’s Flutter to be specific but they sure know it’s some hybrid/non-native crap.

I recently started using Ente migrating from Authy and goodness it feels and looks awful. I wish 2FAS had a desktop app. There was a native alternative that allows exporting codes. (This is not against Ente devs. I am sure they are a small team bringing out a FOSS product. This is just my preference)

1oooqooq5• 2 years ago

the responsiveness and consistency is fine. ente just have weird design choices but that's a matter of taste

divan24• 2 years ago

Do you just assume that Flutter is the same as typical other "hybrid/non-native" crap?

heavyset_go• 2 years ago

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.

I was a Flutter early adopter going on for like 7 years ago now, and Flutter has its place, but I don't know if I could repeat your sentiment with a straight face. Especially when comparing it to Qt.

lopatin2• 2 years ago

we do not want, or intend, to fork the Flutter community.

I can't reconcile that statement with the rest of the blog post. Good intentions aside, this is exactly what they are on the path to doing.

From the post:

By forking Flutter, we get to decide what gets merged.

I'll allow myself to be naively blunt since I just learned of this and I don't have a stake in this battle, but it seems like a nice little coup attempt that Google can squash by putting more resources into Flutter if they feel the pressure.

kevincox2• 2 years ago

can squash by putting more resources into Flutter

So success?

okwhateverdude• 2 years ago

nice little coup attempt that Google can squash

I mean, Google could also punt and let Flutter die. They've killed greater investments for less.

madeofpalk2• 2 years ago

What are some examples of good 'impossible to tell' UIs built with flutter on desktop or web?

flawn2• 2 years ago

Google Wallet & Google Classroom

divan24• 2 years ago

My comment was related to mobile apps. Web apps built on Flutter definitely can be distinguished. The thing is, with web apps, people have developed feelings for the "nativeness" - because browsers make a lot of UI choices for them.

A typical example is a selection of the text. Because web apps are built using XML-based typesetting language from 80-s, everything is selectable by default. No matter how many layers of abstraction you put on top of that hackish foundation, you are still running it in the program (browser) designed to show text. So you can select buttons, navigation controls, images, sound players, etc. And it feels very native to web users.

But when you actually think about it, it's an insanely stupid UI choice that neither of proper UI frameworks would even consider. Sure, you can "opt-out" with recent CSS controls for selection, but it's again, a hack - the default choice of "everything is selectable" is made by default for you by the browser. What does it even mean - select button widget? Why would you enable this complicated selection functionality for your UI that allows users to select navigation buttons with a blue selection box? Of course, if your app needs this functionality - you can add it. But otherwise, it would be labeled as a very stupid UI choice. Yet, feels native to web.

Another example is zooming. Because UI apps written in web stack can't completely hide the fact that what they are doing is essentially trying to morph text primitives into complicated UI widgets (makes sense for 2024, right?), and the browser is essentially a text viewer, everything is zoomable and feels "native" to be able to zoom a web app. And yet, this rarely works as intended. In any other UI framework, making zoom functionality requires thinking about what and how you want to zoom and why. OS text size preferences are well handled by flutter, but sometimes you do want to add your own zoom functionality. In web though you just blindly zoom everything, often blowing off the layouts and that feels very "native" to web.

My point is, that I don't think UI frameworks should try to match the nativeness of web, especially when they start targeting the wasm platform. These couple of decades of proliferation of web frameworks built on top of HTML/JS/CSS should just wane in history as a dark period of software engineering.

awinter-py• 2 years ago

it's possible to tell

chipdart4• 2 years ago

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.

Electron-based apps are also everywhere and they are through and through bad and a step backward. I would take caution to not do appeals to authority. I would extend this assertion over any javascript-on-a-webview-based GUI framework. Awful concept from start to finish.

The fact that you failed to give any specifics to support your superlatives leads to suspect that the comparison with Electron is well suited.

divan24• 2 years ago

You are right, sheer popularity is not the argument for the quality of the framework. I wrote those two sentences separately for different purposes (the second was more of a reflection of other comments in the thread. I should've put it in a separate paragraph or elaborated more.

zigzag3123• 2 years ago

Not OP, but what makes Flutter good IMO is drawing directly to native canvas, a very good hot reload implementation and AOT compilation.

There are three ways cross-platform UI frameworks draw UI. 1) wrap platform controls, 2) use webview or 3) use low-level graphics API.

Option 1 has to design controls to cater for the lowest common denominator. And there is a higher chance that an OS update might break things that in options 2 or 3. Being based on wildly different APIs (for each platform) increases complexity of creating and maintaining custom controls.

Option 2 has to render UI through a high-level declarative language made for documents.

Option 3 uses same APIs as native UI frameworks use. It's basically alternative implementation of an UI framework. Downside is that it has it's own look and feel, which is mostly an issue, if native UI framework is more polished.

Flutter, being option 3, is more similar to a game engine, than to Electron. Low-level graphic APIs maintain good backwards compatibility, so OS updates don't affect the framework much. Less maintenance is needed.

Good hot reload makes use of XML unnecessary and allows to declare UI in an actual, more powerful programming language. Overall, this removes another layer of complexity. (MS take a hint)

AOT compilation enables fast startup times and less pauses. Which is good as end users are opening and closing applications all the time.

poulpy1232• 2 years ago

Flutter is the best thing that happened to UI development since Qt.

Which programming languages have a good developer experience with flutter beside dart ?

rdsnsca• 2 years ago

None, Flutter is dart only.

thiht2• 2 years ago

Most people don't realize how many apps written in Flutter they use daily, simply because it's impossible to tell

I know I use exactly one and it sucks. It’s all janky and weird compared to the rest of the system.

dominicrose• 2 years ago

After using Typescript and React, building a front-end with Flutter is boring, as are other Google frameworks (Angular, GWT).

Maybe if you've never worked with TS/React and more generally HTML/JS/CSS, then it may be OK for some use-cases.

palata2• 2 years 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.

IshKebab3• 2 years ago

Curl is easily 1000x simpler than Flutter and has existed for many times longer. Not really comparable.

palata2• 2 years ago

Exactly: the number of users is just not a good way to measure this.

eviks• 2 years ago

Does curl have any semblance of customer support?

ibero• 2 years 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• 2 years ago

The data is supposedly there: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41975320

munchler2• 2 years 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• 2 years 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• 2 years ago

Where's the actual repo for the fork?

It's not linked to anywhere and not listed under the flutter github org...

brunorsini• 2 years ago

Anyone else experiencing déjà vu from the days of transitioning from Angular to Angular 2?

divan24• 2 years ago

No. Angular 2 wasn't a drop-in fork for Angular 1.

corytheboyd• 2 years 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• 2 years 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• 2 years ago

I highly doubt there are 1,000,000 flutter developers

synergy20• 2 years 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• 2 years ago

I had the same thought and ended up learning swift and out had been great.

stux2• 2 years ago

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-...)

- 40+ PRs from 2019

So, disgruntled ex-employee?

deskr• 2 years 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.

DaiPlusPlus3• 2 years ago

If existing tests are failing then how are they accepting any PRs at all?

bmitc• 2 years 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.

hersheyhersh5• 2 years 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.

stux2• 2 years 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”.

concerndc1tizen3• 2 years ago

I remember the name 'hersheyhersh' in some Flutter context. But the account has zero activity, so it's questionable that this is a Flutter founder.

wstrange• 2 years ago

I believe he means "a founder who uses Flutter". Poor wording, but I don't think it was intentional.

lopatin2• 2 years ago

What was that phrase about not assuming malice when you could assume something else?

Most likely GP saw the actual Flutter founder announcing themselves as "flutter founder" and assumed it was a common phrase for founders who use Flutter lol.

hersheyhersh5• 2 years ago

I meant to say, "Founder using Flutter here".

flakes• 2 years ago

Who is "we" in all of this?

Not even visible on the github org 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• 2 years ago

Guess Flock is free to use now that Google abandoned their other project named “FLoC”

mdaniel6• 2 years 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)

eseidel10• 2 years 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-progr...

mdaniel6• 2 years 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/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=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/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

cageface• 2 years ago

Of all the different dev stacks I've used Flutter has given me the fewest issues across updates. I've never run `flutter upgrade` and then had serious trouble getting an existing project to run.

Compared to js, react & react native, python, ruby etc I've just never hit the same bitrot so they're doing something right.

throwaway0320235• 2 years ago

Absolutely true. It’s so much easier to upgrade dependencies and if it works / most likely works. We had a small UI regression in a very large app and that hadn’t been touched in 1 year.

never_inline• 2 years ago

Almost everything these days is installed like that.

iml7• 2 years 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• 2 years ago

"Fear not little Flork..."

delduca• 2 years 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• 2 years 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.

malkia3• 2 years ago

Python is an engine, flutter is the whole car.

wruza5• 2 years 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.

lolinder3• 2 years ago

If Flutter is a car, Python is at least four different models of car, plus three models of light truck and one airplane.

The scope of Python's standard library is just enormous.

joezydeco• 2 years ago

Like a Fisker Ocean?

Launched, abandoned. Scammed again.

When are you all gonna learn?

DeathArrow10• 2 years ago

Then Django or Pytorch are cars, too.

rvnx3• 2 years ago

“Flutter team members don't actually use Flutter.” (as per the website).

This could explain a lot.

kllrnohj3• 2 years ago

Very rarely do the people working full time on a framework/tool also use that framework/tool in a non-toy setting. They aren't working two full time jobs after all.

chipdart4• 2 years ago

This could explain a lot.

Only if you're oblivious to the day-to-day activities of a software project. They work on building a framework, not on using said said framework to build something entirely different that has no bearing in how to build a framework.

dietr1ch2• 2 years ago

Seems to me that as projects mature they require less effort too. It's hard to account for that since

Python started in 1989, it's older than Linux and it has a more narrow scope.

brainless• 2 years ago

Python doesn't have a narrow scope. At least compared to Flutter. It's in so many places, from Linux installers, to medical, aerospace, math,... and finally the web (which is probably what we hear about the most).

zX41ZdbW• 2 years ago

I have statistics about real team size behind open-source repositories, and it is exceedingly rare to be larger than 50: https://play.clickhouse.com/play?user=play#U0VMRUNUIHJlcG9fb...

For comparison, my open-source product has around 20..30 according to the monthly stats (I want these numbers to be higher, though): https://play.clickhouse.com/play?user=play#U0VMRUNUIHRvU3Rhc...

eskibars2• 2 years ago

This is significantly undercounting in at least several cases I know of. e.g. I was employed by Elastic and Kong and in both cases, the number of developers employed by the company to work on these projects was several multiples the size reported here

alberth• 2 years ago

Rails has 12 core developers + 5 committers.

https://rubyonrails.org/community

DeathArrow10• 2 years ago

And 17 users.

kyriakos• 2 years ago

PHP Foundation has 10 developers and runs a substantial part of the web. 50 developers are definitely the wrong reason to fork flutter.

rurban• 2 years ago

50 developers would be definitely a good reason to fork. It's way too much. 1, max 2 would be the perfect size.

pzo9• 2 years ago

Flutter has much bigger scope than PHP Foundation. It's more fair to compare PHP Foundation scope to Dart Lang and Dart SDK. Flutter scope on top of that is Flutter Engine, Flutter Widgets, Flutter Framework, Flutter Packages, Dev Tools (IntelliJ + VSCode). PHP also support desktops/server environments instead of Flutter 6 platform (iOS, Android, Windows, Linux, MacOS, Web). Making crossplatform UI toolkit is the most labor intensive - PHP Foundation is not developing that. PHP had also 2 decades ahead of development.

wink2• 2 years ago

Not sure this is a good comparison because the PHP Foundation is "relatively" new and afaik there's no strong correlation to "the php development team" besides these people being paid and also work on it. PHP had a 20y history before this foundation, and the main difference is that it was never steered directly by one big company. Zend, yeah, but they had influence, they had neither started the project, nor ever had a long-stretching majority of people in the important positions. (Disclaimer: have not been an active part of the project for a couple years)

billmcneale• 2 years ago

Yeah... no. The team was recently transferred from the US to Germany, the numbers were estimated around 10 engineers.

dd_xplore• 2 years ago

Even whatsapp had about 50 members when they were handling billion users

chipdart4• 2 years ago

Even whatsapp had about 50 members when they were handling billion users

I would add that running a service deployed to N regions is considerably more demanding and work-intensive than working on a releasable software package.

No one working on Flutter is woken up in the middle of the night by a pager because a user was not able to install a package, to then create a call to pull in half a dozen of Flutter engineers.

wg03• 2 years ago

Python's standard library rarely changes except deprecating features or new additions.

Underneath - POSIX + handful of Windows APIs for porting it to Windows. Cross platform aspect is mostly for the compilers to produce the binaries.

Flutter is not Python, PHP or Whatsapp. It has to emulate UI of six platforms (Web, Mac, Windows, Linux, Android, iOS) with easily 50+ widgets.

Flutter unfortunately is not comparable to a language interpreter. The surface area is altogether different.

HeavyStorm2• 2 years ago

Every project is different. Claiming it needs more developers because "it needs to emulate UI of six platforms" as if that justifies a larger team is also fallacious.

I wanted to see the evidence that the community is lacking support and/or flutter is lagging behind competition. That would justify Flock's goal... Otherwise, it sounds a lot like both naivette and a unpublished agenda.

DeathArrow10• 2 years ago

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.

But that leaves Python slow and single threaded.

broodbucket• 2 years ago

https://docs.python.org/3/howto/free-threading-python.html

nottorp4• 2 years ago

But does python use protobufs and monorepos and <insert google induced fetish here>?

Maybe they have more time to work on the software because of less overhead...

anonzzzies• 2 years ago

Python is really not the same as Flutter. Compare Python to Dart instead.

vishnugupta• 2 years ago

I know this isn't a Apples-to-Apples comparison but antirez was the sole maintainer (after creating it) of Redis for more than decade[1]

[1] https://redis.io/blog/thank-you-salvatore-sanfilippo/

agilob• 2 years ago

I think author put incorrect words into the statement you are quoting. Flutter has much less mature environment, UI packages look good, but most are hot garbage without even unit tests. You can't trust even a single one if it doesn't have at least 5 active developers. They are drying like flies, no one maintains them, updates on time and Dart package manager doesn't help at all, makes things worse by having that system of requirements, versions. I used to work on a side project in Dart and Flutter and quickly fall in love, because i was able to write UI and backend code super quickly, but about 18 months later, I was spending more time maintaining packages that were dropped by original authors, updating, fixing conflicts between versions, and this was the reason I simply rewrote everything back to Java, even frontend to PrimeFaces (: Nothing broke by itself since early 2021.

Even Google dropped 3 packages I used in my projects. Including Dart Angular, they archived it 7 months after promising in AMA they will maintain it for a decade ahead (: They also abandoned their flutter charts library, it stopped working in newer versions of Dart and community had to fork it, they made like 80 forks in a week.

I think this is the problem author is trying to say, not Flutter as the framework, but as the general ecosystem that's consistent and provides at least somewhat positive experience using it. Google is neglecting it.

HeavyStorm2• 2 years ago

Besides, it's pure speculation; where's the hard data behind 1.000.000 developers? That's a very large number to be a guess.

crossroadsguy2• 2 years 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• 2 years 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• 2 years 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• 2 years ago

A tangential question: For someone looking to start using React Native (targeting both Android and iOS), is Flutter a viable alternative in 2024 ?

owaislone• 2 years 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.

nnurmanov• 2 years 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

DeathArrow10• 2 years 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__• 2 years 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.

DeathArrow10• 2 years ago

I would love Swift to be forked so it becomes more usable outside of Apple's ecosystem.

cellularmitosis2• 2 years ago

What would you change at the language level?

DeathArrow10• 2 years ago

Not at the language level but at library and framework level.

rererereferred• 2 years ago

Isn't swift already cross platform? https://git.aparoksha.dev/aparoksha/adwaita-swift

Or do you mean the UI Apple uses on top of swift?

DeathArrow10• 2 years 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• 2 years 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.

skrebbel2• 2 years 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.

kreetx2• 2 years ago

Ruby has plenty of other applications written in it, it definitely doesn't belong to the "one app" language list.

mrbombastic• 2 years 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.

Alifatisk5• 2 years 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.

zigzag3123• 2 years ago

C# port of Flutter would be a dream.

mdaniel6• 2 years ago

Well, I hear that there's a foundation for it, so: new leadership, new rules. I can't tell from the outside how much of Flutter/Flock is deeply tied to Dart versus it just happens to be a bespoke language because 20% Time exists

DeathArrow10• 2 years ago

C# has Maui for mobile and desktop development. And Blazor for fronted.

The community is oriented towards having one framework or library for doing one thing.

munificent4• 2 years ago

I work on Dart.

Programming language popularity is hard. The network effects are absolutely massive. 99% of all programming languages are a rounding error away from having zero users. To start to compete with any of the big entrenched languages seems to require either:

1. An extremely easy migration story so the language can leverage ("parasitize"?) the existing ecosystem of another alread popular language. That's C++ for C, Kotlin for Java, TypeScript for JS, etc. This is definitely the easiest path to success.

But it means your language is significantly hampered in its design because of the need to be compatible with the language it's building on. This is why C++ is still failing to be a safe language and is a sprawling mess. It's why Kotlin has type erasure. It's why TypeScript, despite having a fantastically complex type system, is still unsound and can't use types to compile more efficient code.

2. A compelling platform or framework that developers want to be on so bad they'll learn a new language. Rails for Ruby, iOS for Objective-C and Swift. This is the harder path but it means the new language is less shackled to a previous one and can be more innovative.

Dart took the second path. I agree it would be nice if Dart had more pillars shoring up its success than just Flutter and I hope we get there one day. But one successful framework is more than most newer languages have and you have to start somewhere.

I'm obviously biased, but I think Dart is a good general purpose language and would work well for many different domains. But fighting against the network effects is hard and growth takes time.

wg03• 2 years 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• 2 years 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.

pritambarhate2• 2 years 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.

monooso• 2 years 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• 2 years ago

how are Ubuntu's Flutter integration plans evolving these days?

https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/refreshing-the-ubuntu-desktop...

Alifatisk5• 2 years 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

thiht2• 2 years 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.

pritambarhate2• 2 years 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• 2 years ago

Flutter is weak in North America but extremely strong in LatAm / Europe / India / Africa

kbcool3• 2 years 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.

troelsbjerre• 2 years ago

There are 27.4k forks of the flutter repo. This is just yet another one.

Alifatisk5• 2 years 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.

ototot• 2 years 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.

jmull• 2 years 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• 2 years 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/, which offer an alternative to React Native.

firemelt• 2 years ago

so we cant sent a pr to flutter or what? I always thought flutter is open source

Alifatisk5• 2 years 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• 2 years 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.

nprateem2• 2 years 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• 2 years ago

It would be great to make good flutter support for embedded devices

We're forking Flutter

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