elye-project.medium.com/is-flutter-facing-its-end-9da4d42334f9?sk=6652fee90aa30c0e87a520ff236269ea
Is Flutter Facing its End
I have a project I'm building in flutter. But agreed, I'm very nervous about it being backed by Google. Google's now being ran by the finance guys, and anything not bringing in profit (i.e., anything not search) is at risk of getting abandoned by Google.
Android, Gmail, Maps, Chrome are safe since they complement the search experience. Flutter? Questionable.
You mean ads not search
"There's a difference?"
-Google execs, probably
Sure. They have ads on a million things that aren’t search.
Gmail? Ads.
YouTube? Ads.
Maps? Ads
Their apps have streamlined ads for flutter apps which is the money train and also the less of a need to hire more developers to create the same app for different platforms.
I feel Google is going the way of Boeing.
Yes sir, this whistleblower right here.
No reply in 21h, rip
anything not bringing in profit (i.e., anything not search) is at risk of getting abandoned by Google.
Isn't it Search, YouTube and Cloud these days?
Search ads is still the biggest piece of the pie. https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/s/7QLf9HQjh2
Youtube is finally profitable?
I doubt it. Looking that twitter that is only text, costs 5B per year, ai van mot imagine that 29B of revenue is nearly enough for youtube.
At this point I think they finance it just so no one else can make a competitive platform.
It's running so many ads now, with zero regard for placement of timing. Getting to the point where I'll think twice about going there to find anything good.
Opera browser?
Search is now ran by the ads director and it’s getting a lot worse.
Google uses Flutter themselves internally on some mobile app projects, to avoid having to staff separate teams for a native Android + native iOS app. So long as there's no clearly substantially better alternative available for cross-platform app development (React Native is maybe a danger here), they will at the very least keep it maintained, even if it loses resources for new development.
Google is also pouring tons of money into Compose Multiplatform, which will probably become the competitor with unified business logic and UI in one codebase
You mean JetBrains?
They're partnered with and funded by Google. Which is why I wrote "pouring money into" and not "making".
Last I read, Compose for Android is worked on by Google and Jetbrains takes that, adapts it and makes it work on iOS. Has that changed? Are Google making an active effort towards it now?
There's actually 2 "Composes" - Jetpack Compose which is Android only, and then Compose Multiplatform, which is for all platforms. There's an overlap but Compose Multiplatform needs different dependencies and libraries and you basically have three options;
- build each app for each platform independently (defeats the purpose but you can)
- build common business logic but build independent UI for each app (yes, that includes Swift for iOS)
- build both business logic and UI in the common part and only fallback to native when needed (for example, display a pop-up dialog)
As far as I understand, Google funds JetBrains to make these, and set standards as the de-facto controller of Android but doesn't develop it themselves?
Exactly. But the main part of this is that Google develops compose core, and then they develop the a Android part as an extension on top of it. So while Google aren't actively developing for other platforms, the architecture shows that it has been developed with multiplatform in mind from the beginning
Pouring Money? Where did you get that from? They doing the bare minimum
Please ping me if they ever reply
I think they are taking it from this statement they made in the Developer Keynote:
"The Workspace team is excited to continue to invest in using Kotlin Multiplatform across the rest of their apps in the future."
https://www.youtube.com/live/ddcZnW1HKUY?si=vGeT7rl5NnD7_kGN&t=1086 (Here's the video, I timestamped the area)
On the other hand, if they create a youtube web client on flutter with WASM the ads will be unblockable (probably), so it is where the possible profit is
I think there's a difference between tech they do for vanity and tech they depend on heavily internally. I don't think we'll ever see the deprecation of Angular without an upgrade path for example.
they are all in on dart for their fuschia operating system right? or is that thing already dead too?
Idk about Dart itself but Fuchsia seems to have the writing on the wall already tbh. The latest info I can find about it (Wikipedia and Ars Technica) is about how Google fired 16% of its workers (Jan '23) and how it's used in the second (and earlier in the first) generation of Google Nest Hub (May '23), so two new things worth mentioning in a whole year and a half for a new OS which has been in development since 2016 and has seen no official announcement or usage on any other product.
Fuchsia was rumored to be the next coming of Android like 6 years ago. I think it's fair to say that probably won't happen.
A complete OS takes quite some time, no matter how much money and how many warm bodies you throw at it.
I'm not exactly hopeful about Fuschia because, well, because Google, but the timeline to date isn't unreasonable even in the world where it actually does happen eventually.
(i.e. I think you're probably right, but not because of that, if you see what I mean ;)
Completely agree. Angular is a prime example because they depend on it internally, as they do Flutter. Flutter also has a substantially higher market share than Angular, which leads me to believe it is a solid choice.
At the end of the day, anything can be abandoned. Yes, this is Google and they do have a history of abandonment. However, data is the best way to make an informed decision. All the indicators are there for Flutter imho, and there is only one more indicator for React Native — it’s not Google. That metric has far less weight when you look at market share and internal use for past Google projects which got the axe.
Flutter also has a substantially higher market share than Angular
Source? Angular is huge in the enterprise space.
I wish I could drop bad habits out of nowhere
Honestly they feel like microsoft in the 90s. Create the MSDN program, be nice to devs.. then rug pull.
perfect analogy. I got rug pulled so many times in the 00's that I dropped the MS stack and went to OSS
You should should come back. The ads in the start menu are incredible.
I thought you were kidding but then I recalled that it's true
My greatest mistake was starting a career with a Google technology.
Bad habits are, notoriously, difficult to drop.
I'm assuming unlike other products which have been close sourced this can still live on due to teh community.
Author needs people to proof-read their documents prior to publishing.
All fine, the AI that wrote the article got peer reviewed by three other AI.
OK but who audits the AI that wrote those three AI chatbots?
Believe it or not another AI. But behind that is a guy in India being paid $2 a day.
GPT-4 extremely rarely makes grammatical or spelling errors though
I can't even read the article because it's member-only, which is incredibly bad etiquette for someone posting an article on Reddit (much less their own). Downvoted the post.
Medium, at worst, gives me a pop-up that attempts to get me to login, subscribe, and/or download an app, but always offers option to just continue reading with on tap.
Maybe not same for everyone?
Pretty sure it's the same for every one... some people see the popup and think it requires login, and miss the "continue reading" (small text) at the bottom. Medium probably does that intentionally to get more people to signup.
Actually no, there are stories like this one that are "member-only", which you can only access when paying for medium. Free users seem to get a allowance of a few each month, which is why you may were able to access it.
The OP was posted as a 'friend link' which bypassed the paywall for me (following links to the author's other articles hit the paywall).
You -may- need to be logged in; I logged into it with a spare google account a long time back and that seems to've stuck, but I have never and will never give medium money and I was still able to read the whole thing.
scribe.rip exists as altwenative frontend
Clickbait don't need to proofreading.
The headline is the only thing that matters and let's face it it's the only thing this subreddit is discussing.
proofread; proof read; NOT proof-read with "their" after it fo sho
I loved Dart and Flutter but the worst part of the experience by far is that 99% of the discourse is around when Google will kill the project for no reason.
The Flutter subreddit is almost nothing but people worrying about the future of the platform and looking for reassurance that it's ok to start a project using it. And the answer is a shrug. People have been scared to start new projects with Flutter since around 2022.
oh there'a reason. how about:
- the original devs got it on their resumes, got promotions and then moved on
- flutter doesn't drive ads
In what way Flutter doesnt drive ads ?
As in unlike the rest of core Google (search, gmail, maps, etc.) it doesn't have any way to indoctrinate its users into seeing ads.
That's a net negative for the finance bros in Google because they don't realise trust in a product is just as important as pulling in money
Interesting context around the recent news. The idea seems to make sense, though I think Google has shown they're perfectly fine killing entire products without concern over the impacts it has on their customers.
Therefore, I doubt Google will abruptly discontinue it like Xamarin, which ended support on May 1, 2024
That's a bit disingenuous, .NET Maui is Xamarin 2.0. It is certainly a big upgrade with tons of breaking changes, but they didn't just pull the rug and walk away from the entire mobile space as this implies.
That's a bit disingenuous, .NET Maui is Xamarin 2.0. It is certainly a big upgrade with tons of breaking changes, but they didn't just pull the rug and walk away from the entire mobile space as this implies.
Yeah, it also makes the chart at the top misleading. You'd have to add MAUI numbers to the Xamarin numbers, although you'd still fall short of React Native.
I think there's a big difference between google killing consumer products and google killing business products. Flutter is in millions of apps, I doubt it's going anywhere
How is Flutter a "Google business product"? The only tangential revenue stream I can see is services like Firebase.
Flutter is as much a "Google business product" as React is Meta's.
It's not. It's a framework, it was created initially by a company but now stands on its own as a community.
Um. Google uses Flutter on various consumer apps. But it uses Dart extensively. The entire AdWords, as I understand it, system is mostly dart transpiled into JavaScript. That is the core of their revenue generation. Dart isn’t going away.
On top of that Flutter has enough momentum for Google to be using it in new products. The narrowing of focus so things like multi-window being shelved is likely a good thing. Does Google ship desktop Flutter apps? I don’t know.
The latest interoper moves in dart are going to be significant. As well as the macro features. These are going to be force multipliers. These should make development much more robust.
Lastly. Which most users don’t really see but is likely happening in the background is a lot of supply chain provenance tooling for dart being put in place. This is a huge aspect of enterprise development that the JS community couldn’t do itself (maybe MSFT is working it out) but will be uphill battle (as well for Python). Dart’s static typing will help tremendously along with the interop packages.
I think dart/flutter is in a very good place.
But it uses Dart extensively. The entire AdWords, as I understand it, system is mostly dart transpiled into JavaScript. That is the core of their revenue generation. Dart isn’t going away.
That doesn't mean they won't sunset it publicly. Google has a history of maintaining tech internally, such as an entirely different version of protobuf than the public one (might be unified now, not sure).
You fail to mention the graveyard of dead Google projects, so your faith in Google seems a bit too eager there.
Google uses Flutter on various consumer apps
This exact same scenario already happened with AngularDart and despite being heavily used inside Google, its open source version got killed anyways. IMO this is the worst argument you could possibly make regarding anything related to dart.
AngularDart is not a consumer app. Also look at the adoption of angularDart.it was probably tiny. Why go through gyrations of continuing open source project if it’s not being adopted externally? They can keep it Internal and save themselves a lot of overhead. Very costly to run open source project.
If i recall correctly Google uses Flutter on Google Earth, Google Classroom and maybe Google Pay (India?). These are end user facing apps.
I Ppl sound pissed. The sentence “this is the worse way to make this argument” is not helpful to the discussion. Relax. I don’t particularly care what you think. Nor do I think you care what I think :/) just trying to stay informational and factual.
Leave out the emotional side.
Dart and Flutter are also open source. They can continue being developed if there is enough interest from the community.
Apps bring in more revenue on iOS, so if someone is making an app, they're more likely to make it for iOS (and we see this). Flutter makes it more likely for businesses to build for iOS AND Android since it's a similar amount of work, meaning Google gets more apps on its store, meaning more revenue overall
It's not so simple as "Flutter directly brings in revenue" it's more "Flutter allows our other products to bring in more revenue" which has been their business model for decades.
It's not consumer facing in that it doesn't rely on consumer subscriptions or ad revenue to remain afloat on its own merits, it's business facing in that sense as businesses use it and rely on it, directing more people to Google products. Historically they kill off these sort of business products significantly less often
The problem Google faced was Apple's app store dominance particularly in the US where the money is being spent. So a lot of devs would make the Apple version of their app and not even bother with the Android one. It was as much effort again, massively more complicated to test since you have thousands of devices instead of a dozen or so and on average lower performance devices which tends to make development harder. It just wasn't worth the hassle to gain access to the last 10% of the market.
So the point of a cross platform development solution is to convince potential developers they can get Android support for free. That's why it was a google business product. It was created to fulfil a business need, that of getting app store devs to also support the android store. It was created to help Google as a business.
If I had to guess I'd say it's dying now because Apple are having to open up their platform in the EU and likely they're going to face a lot of pressure to do so in the US as well. So now Google will be looking and thinking they can just install the Android store on iPhone, make the APIs compatible and focus on making Android tooling and try and take the iPhone devs away from Apple that way. Google don't want devs making apps for the iOS store, given the choice between making apps for both iOS and Android or just iOS however they'll take the latter. Now they are seeing a chance to maybe squeeze out iOS and become the default everyone uses so they'll take it because there's a trillion dollars on the line.
make the APIs compatible
Oh dear lord no, that's never going to happen. Additionally, I'd be surprised if there's ever a universe where iOS permits java apps
You already have Java apps since Java can compile natively. It's done with JavaFX all the time.
There already is in the EU (or will be soon, I'm not sure when exactly Apple have to finish opening everything up, sometime next year I think though I could be wrong). Other than the not-insubstantial hurdle of implementing all the Android APIs for iOS hardware they could already do it and that hurdle is certainly well within the realms of a company the size of Google to cross.
Alternative app stores likely doesn't mean installing whatever software, just an alternative way of installing the same executables. Android allows alternative app stores, but they're still APKs
Yes, it literally does mean installing whatever software in this case. The whole point is to prevent Apple from gatekeeping what software you can install because they were abusing that position to their own benefit.
As others are saying it's probably indirect revenue where Flutter gets the dev closer to other paid google services and also encourages them to release apps for android.
From a business standpoint it might be more convenient to think of open source projects as a mix of R&D and Marketing.
*citation needed
There is no way Flutter is in millions of apps, it's still pretty darn niche relatively speaking.
https://docs.flutter.dev/resources/faq
As of May 2023, over one million apps have shipped using Flutter to many hundreds of millions of devices.
What are they counting as an app here?
There are only ~2.5m apps on Android, and only ~2m apps on iOS.
25% of app apps definitely do not use Flutter.
Are that many people using flutter for non mobile apps?
Something doesn't add up here
Using FlutterShark, I have 9 apps on my phone right now that are using Flutter, which is about 5-10% of the apps on my phone. If we take that and extrapolate the amount of apps on android, then that's around 100k apps, with 100k apps on iOS now as well since it can be assumed they're also deployed there
In 2023, people spent about 60 billion through Google play. 15-30% of that goes into Google's pocket, and 5-10% of that can be used to approximate the revenue they make from Flutter's existence, so... Between 500 million and 1.8 billion. That doesn't take into account any additional revenue from funneling Flutter users into other Google products, letting them gain additional revenue from ads and Firebase/GCP spend via iOS that they wouldn't have received otherwise
So long as that outpaces the cost of engineers, or the opportunity cost of putting them elsewhere, Flutter will stick around
That's a bit disingenuous, .NET Maui is Xamarin 2.0. It is certainly a big upgrade with tons of breaking changes, but they didn't just pull the rug and walk away from the entire mobile space as this implies.
At least until MAUI is discontinued...
MAUI wasn't just a cross platform development framework - MAUI was a core UI library for versions of Windows that have since been canceled. It was supposed to the be the future of Windows development - and it already lost that fight. And Mac support has basically be scrubbed (they support iOS-apps-on-Mac layer which is kind of eh.)
I wouldn't want to be relying on MAUI at all at this point. Only a matter of time until MS questions why they're putting resources into a framework that is primarily being used on other vendors platforms.
your history is incorrect. maui is exclusively the evolution of xamarin. what you're talking about is winui, specifically winui 3.
the remarkable success of Kotlin Multiplatform
I’ve never heard of an app written with it.
We tried, gave up. Awful compared to other tech that exists. Maybe in a few years.
I'm developing the core logic of a suite of applications with kotlin multiplatform, as it can then interop both with native Kotlin/Java code on Android and Objective-C/Swift code on iOS.
Granted it's not the usual piece of cake, documentation and online resources are quite limited at the moment, but it's a pleasant experience overall, would definitely recommend for cross-platform development
Excuse my noob question. From your description it sounds like your cant do UI or hardware dependent development using kotlin multiplatform. Is this the case?
UI can be done with Compose Multiplatform which is similar to Jetpack Compose, so it translates to the native UI toolkit on Android and renders widgets for iOS/Android similarly to what flutter does. I’m not sure it will stay this way or if they’re moving towards a more fluttery architecture for Android too.
For native code, kinda. A lot of primitives are unified by the kotlin standard library and some official kotlin libraries (e.g. kotlinx-datetime). When you find yourself in a situation where no existing libraries provides a unified interface to some piece of functionality you can write that part as a library for the native platform and call it from kotlin. It sounds more complicated than what it is, I’ll give you some pointers: check out the “expect” and “actual” keywords in the kotlin multiplatform docs, you should be able to find some examples
Edit: fix architecture description
Thanks for your answer.
Small point of clarification, jpc on Android doesn’t wrap the old view system. It is a full separate implementation of the material 2 & 3 spec that renders using skia. That’s one of the reasons that it isn’t a massive undertaking to bring it to iOS.
Thanks! I edited the comment above accordingly
I'm developing the core logic of a suite of applications with kotlin multiplatform, as it can then interop both with native Kotlin/Java code on Android and Objective-C/Swift code on iOS.
This could be AI generated
I’ll grant it was a bit of a generic statement, but it was generated by my spongy brain, no AI involved.
If you want more details I can tell you that I’ll also need to wrap everything in a stupid Capacitor/Cordova/<whatever kids do these days> plugin so that “””mobile””” developers can avoid having to interact with the underlying platform
I assume you must've heard about Netflix
https://www.jetbrains.com/help/kotlin-multiplatform-dev/case-studies.html
Cashapp has adopted KMM for almost five years now
Kotlin multiplatform actually kicks ass. I was able to unify my separate Android and iOS apps with it and I haven’t had any fundamental issues with the framework even since alpha.
I highly recommend it especially for new development but even with existing apps if you’re sick of separate development. The only downside is there’s a steep learning curve if you’re coming from an iOs-only background.
Whats the common viewmodel you use? I don't feel like using kmm without a proper viewmodel as of yet...
I implemented a generic live-data-like view model in Kotlin multiplatform. Basically a stateflow with a coroutine scope so that iOS can asynchronously consume events on the UI thread.
Then I have native mappers that convert that to an ObservableObject for SwiftUI and State for Compose. I haven’t tried Compose Multiplatform yet.
If you have a sample code I would love to take a look!
Sorry, it’s all proprietary. I submitted a talk to Kotlinconf this year but it wasn’t accepted.
It I ever get time I may put a presentation up on youtube and post it here.
From 1.6.10 they will provide a native multiplatform ViewModel
https://www.jetbrains.com/help/kotlin-multiplatform-dev/whats-new-compose-eap.html#lifecycle-library
I’ve been a fan of jet brains products since my first run of IDEA in 2010.
Dabbled in Xamarin for a while and I had so many issue I wasted hours going around them.
A true JB cross platform sounds perfect. At least they won’t drop the stack or downsize the team to a dozen people.
Time to restore my jetbrains subscription
Just chiming in for the Xamarin hate, I absolutely loathed my time using it
Similar experience. Spent so much time going down platform-specific rabbit-holes that it just started making more sense to bite the bullet and go native.
Please excuse the noob question. Can you do UI or hardware dependent programming with kotlin multiplatform?
UI uses compose multiplatform which I haven’t tried yet. I use native SwiftUI and Jetpack Compose.
I never even knew this was an option. I maintain a cross platform ionic/capacitor/angular web app.
Will definitely look into this for our future
How long have you been using it? We started a couple of years ago, and it's been pretty painful: lots of bugs in the IDE specially with KTor (which is mandatory if you're going to do anything in the backend - e.g. without KTor you won't have even an URL class as you can't use Java stdlib in KMP)... lots of changes in the Gradle DSL which was very annoying to upgrade. There's very little documentation so you have to guess how to do a bunch of things... we've even got paid support lately, so we can ask the JB developers directly!
We use KMP for backend and light mobile/web development... I've also used Flutter for mobile, and Flutter, right now, is incomparably more polished and has much better UX. That can change with time, but unless Google drops Flutter development, it will still take years.
If you started a couple of years ago, your pain is completely understandable.
I've been doing KMP work for a few years, and it has gone through some radical evolution in that time. Some of my earliest projects had to be ditched entirely and restarted mostly from scratch because there were so many changes in the build environment.
But that's kind of an inevitable consequence of being on the bleeding edge. KMP is only a few years old, I think it only just reached "production" status within the last year or so. So we were basically playing with an experimental platform until pretty recently.
The good news is that it's a hell of a lot more stable now. Anyone starting a KMP project today won't feel anywhere near the pain that you and I did in the early days. It's still growing rapidly, and I think we can expect significant improvements over the next few years, but those are the kinds of changes that are going to make your project better, not break it.
A few years. We worked with Touchlab to get over some of the initial difficulties but haven’t needed any external help for a while.
Gradle has definitely been the most painful part. I’ve spent a ton of time just learning gradle and it has helped a lot.
Isn’t kotlin the default language for android
Yeah. That's Kotlin on JVM. Kotlin Multiplatform is on various platforms for android it compiles to Kotlin/Java bytecode, on web to JS and there's even a Kotlin Native that compiles to binary for your desired OS like windows, linux, darwin or etc.
Threads uses Jetpack Compose on android tho
Todoist is one using it.https://open.spotify.com/episode/7HVK1gK6b9Fp01u4nXZlPs?si=VECqawG5R2eSW1wvc3Cecg
We started to use it, and are now phasing it out of our apps. It’s been the root cause of a ton of bugs.
I've deployed an SDK written with KMP to millions of users in multiple Fortune 500 apps. (Finance)
KMP is still early stage but I can vouch for it when it comes to web and backend. I used it to write thegrokapp.com.
The whole point of cross platform is to write once, run many. KMP is only giving you a single language across platforms, you still have to write separate apps.
It's no different to all that have come before it in that regard.
Edit: Wow that's a lot of poorly informed down votes. I am not sure how you can come to any other conclusion. It's literally from the first page of the documentation
You seem... Ignorant.
Have you heard of Compose Multiplatform?
What do you mean by you have to write separate apps? You have the option to write native UI for each platform, or share UI using compose.
Even if you choose to implement your UI layer natively for each platform, the vast majority of the app containing all the business logic is shared and reusable.
Ubuntu uses Flutter now for their OS installation UI.
source: https://www.reddit.com/r/FlutterDev/comments/12dfw0v/ubuntu_is_now_using_flutter_for_its_installer/
I was using Qt before flutter even existed, looks like I'll still be using Qt after it's over ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Qt on mobile is unfortunately not a focus for the Qt Company, which is a shame because QML is a great tool for mobile UIs. Even desktop often feels neglected (in that regards thankfully we have KDE though). They're mostly focused on embedded.
Qt is the most backwards-ass thing I've seen. It so cumbersome...
Backwards in what way?
I think Flutter was born because they were unsatisfied with cross platforms framworks, and they wanted something good enough they could use for their apps ( Earth...etc ). Much like Angular, it won't die since they use it for their web content, + its gaining a lot of attention. Where I live, it's 50/50 with react native.
Not Flutter related but all I want from any development platform is stability. Just too many breaking changes with no obvious benefit. It's right to reduce teams when the language and environment is stable otherwise they just constantly look for things to fiddle with and reimplement. But those changes often makes things worse than the original version which was well thought out. Sorry rant over.
I don’t pretend to know what will become of Flutter. However I’m fairly confident that the Google in which Flutter and Dart were created no longer exists.
Good read although the conclusion is likely wrong simply based on a lack of reasoning and misalignment with Google’s history
Do shed some light on the insight from Google's history. 🙏
It’s not a secret per say, there are websites dedicated to projects that were awkwardly killed by Google for less:
And this list is just the more well known external stuff..
Ya, they are famous for that. Hope Flutter will not get to the list that soon, as I think it's still a success so far with many big companies adopted it (including Google own apps)
Well, Flutter can be on the graveyard if only Google uses it.
There is a difference between community-driven projects and corporate-driven projects. Flutter right now is corporate-driven.
I can’t say I’m personally a fan, but the posted article makes the case for itself. Google as a company HATES redundancies. Kotlin has made Flutter redundant and Flutter has far less advantages to something like Kotlin Multiplatform. There’s little to no need for them to invest in Flutter as it’s more work, more overhead, produces a worse product, when Kotlin is a 1st class citizen with more penetration and better results.
Is there anything flutter has that kotlin does not? I recommended it to a friend a year ago and now their company has it so I'm trying to figure out how bad to feel
As far as I know it's much easier to embed flutter on new systems that aren't already supported
After a little googling it looks like setting up projects is also a little uglier so I'll call that a win for flutter. With flutter I run a single command and then I can work in my code editor and I've got something ready to run on my phone or in a web browser. Never have to touch android studio! Not that it's bad, I wouldn't know, but I appreciate simpler tooling / pipeline. Hopefully Google can figure that out before abandoning flutter, if that is its future
I actually love the embedding capabilities of flutter. We've got our own custom embedding at work, and it was a breeze to get almost fully functional
lol all you said is complete BS. Flutter already is a huge estabilished ecosystem while KMP is nothing more than a germinating little seed
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Hard to say if it'll end, seems popular enough but Google doesn't quite need to keep it going either.
Google doesn't exactly have a "great" track record for keeping projects open but Angular and Flutter both seem very useful and fulfill needs in the industry.
My biggest issue with Flutter is honestly just Dart itself and I am also not a huge fan with the general lack of documentation when it comes to making non-material components.
Which isn't an awful problem, that's moreso a growth issue.
What's your issue with Dart?
That I have to use it for Flutter 😂.
In all honesty it's that it really doesn't stand out in any particular way.
I prefer Dart over say Python semantically and it's not bad either compared to JavaScript / PHP / Ruby.
However, most of its community support is in the Flutter space so whereas it "could" be better it's just not seeing the usage in other domains.
There are some annoyances here or there though...
First of this practice of using "_" for access modifiers is retarded, I'll just be blunt with that. I hated it in Python and I definitely hate it here. Once you're spoiled with actual access modifiers you really don't want anything less.
Stack traces were historically pretty poor, usually not as informative as just slapping around some print statements; I'll be honest this might be more of an issue with Flutter though.
IIRC also some odd behavior with named parameters, specifically around certain types but would have to look back at that project to give a better statement on that.
I just don't personally see Dart as a language I should invest a significant amount of time into, that doesn't make it "bad" but it doesn't exactly make it "good" either.
I just want to clarify though, not here to poo poo on the language it does have its pros/cons and it's obviously enabling the Flutter team to create well... Flutter.
First of this practice of using "_" for access modifiers is retarded, I'll just be blunt with that.
Agreed.
Other warts of note: required semi-colons, types-on-the-left (string str, instead of str: string), statement based instead of expression based language, no language support for json (de)serialization(!) (need to rely on codegen).
Basically it's an awful language if you've used anything better, like, TypeScript, Scala, Kotlin, F#, C#, OCaml, Haskell, Rust...probably even plain JavaScript is better in some ways than Dart -- have tried twice to get into Flutter dev and I just can't get past Dart, it's absolutely hideous.
To be fair, the language maintainers have been making strides in cleaning up what they can, and it sounds like macros are on the horizon (or maybe they've already arrived), so language support for toJson(foo) could be a reality soon.
Probably too awesome for him
I did a small project in flutter and it was really nice to work with, a lot of lessons learned I think from previous attempts at such frameworks.
Dart on the other hand was kind of half baked, specifically debugging was super lacking and frustrating.
This is in general a big problem that all these corporate-controlled projects have no real genuine community. Sure, there are people using it; yes, they are used outside of the corporation too, but it is not a genuine community-driven project as such. It's corporate-controlled. Given Google has such a poor track record of sustaining project it considers as failing, why should anyone want to bet that flutter will remain active?
Jesus Christ, it's like every day there are posts in this sub about "Flutter is dying" or "Is Flutter Dying?". Flutter is awesome, it's better than React Native, it's open source and will live whether google tries to kill it or not. it's not a proprietary product. Sure if they discontinue their support for it, that will suck, but it will continue.
Ehh....... people act like "open source" means "endless professional-quality labor and support for free". It doesn't.
Sure, there are plenty examples of TRUE "community" projects, in the sense that people picture in their heads. Altruistic volunteers who do it for the love of the code, and require no compensation beyond a tip jar and maybe some consulting services on the side.
However, MOST prominent open-source projects are funded by some corporate benefactor, or a small group of corporate benefactors. The projects are able to exist at a high level, because someone is paying the full-time salaries of the core team members.
Usually, when a corporate benefactor loses interest and walks away, an empty husk of the project continues to limp along in some form. But it's never at the same level again, and its relevance fades quickly.
I'm skeptical that something like Flutter, which needs diverse expertise to support every major mobile AND desktop platform, would survive with a small handful of amateur community volunteers. The best-case scenario would be something like Gluon taking over JavaFX support when Oracle lost interest. A small boutique that keeps the lights on for small-time support contracts, but doesn't have the resources to really advance things.
I would agree with you except for the fact that there are plenty of other companies that have resources invested in Flutter. One thing I think that doesn't get talked about enough is how well Flutter works for embedded devices.
Toyota and Sony, just to name a few.
https://flutter.dev/showcase/toyota
https://github.com/sony/flutter-embedded-linux
Even if Google backs off on support, there is still arguably a "A small group of corporate benefactors" to hopefully keep the project afloat.
I am not acting like Google backing off support would be no big deal, it would be a huge blow that would slow the project down for the near - long term, but if Google does, I am by no means convinced it would be the end of Flutter.
Everything is better than React, but unfortunately most companies use it.
One of, it not the only, reason for it is the amount of talent pool they can hire from. Since it's basically overlap with ReactJS from their PoV.
The real article is always in the comment section.
Do people really think for that long game? It's not like most people are going to develop the same app for the same company for 10+ years.
I choose Flutter because Google is providing cross-platform native libs for free while React Native is mostly rely on community.
It's the safest choice right now and I don't care if it's not getting support after 5 years, it has done it's job and I have done my job.
I wouldn’t be too worried, Golang is from Google aswel and that’s still alive.
flutter.dev is made with AlpineJS, instead of Flutter Web.
Moderator removed comment
21d
This is Ones and Zeroes series of Collectible Avatars.
https://support.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/7559750587540-Collectible-Avatars-on-Reddit
I got mine on a random drop, OpenSea should have some on sale.
Probably, it's owned by Google
Don't anthropomorphize capitalist companies.
It's safe to anthropomorphize the other kinds of companies however.
I use Flutter at my current job and KMP personally. I think they're quite similar in a lot of ways, but the reason I focus so much on Kotlin is that it's more versatile. I know there are a few Dart backend frameworks as well, but they don't compare to Ktor, Spring, or any of the other Kotlin ones. Not only that, but Kotlin as a language is a bit more pleasant for me to write.
I'm not sure what happens with Flutter after this, but it does seem like it'll probably be phased out over the coming years. My expectation is that they'll KTLO until 26, then announce their development is stopping. Maybe they'll open source it at that point, but I'm not sure there are enough Flutter folks in the community to make it a real competitor to MAUI, KMP, React Native, etc.
Flutter is already open source
I'm guessing GP means "moving project governance to an independent foundation".
Yes, that is correct
I use Flutter at my current job and KMP personally. I think they're quite similar in a lot of ways
Okay, can you elaborate, is it quite similar in terms of concept or the overall experience. I confess, I haven't been following KMP, KMM or Kotlin development for sometime, but the last time it was a pain to setup and not at all streamlined. Not to mention you still have to code large portion of the app in both native platform.
Flutter OTOH, have streamlined experience. It's dead simple and pleasant to start with. The tooling support is great and the language (Dart) is evolving and getting better (null safety is standard now, static metaprogramming in the following months, etc).
I would check back into KMP with compose multiplatform. It basically works the same way as Flutter from a coding perspective- you write Material UI widgets and it works in both iOS and Android.
In terms of getting started, download Android Studio and you're good to go.
My God, people have really no clue that Flutter is already far larger than MAUI, KMP and even RN?
In the case that google stops supporting it and goes to KTLO, it will very quickly lose users unless a really strong community organizes around it. I really don't think that will happen, especially when google itself contributes to making KMP better already (and has none of the ownership costs). MAUI isn't going anywhere despite how little it's used. MS clearly wants it to work.
I'm new to mobile app. What about PWA ?
You can do a PWA with Flutter if you want. One of the issues with PWAs is Apple's lack of support for them.
PWAs made more sense before Flutter brought full cross-platform development.
PWA won't happen at scale as they would end the current business model around App Store and Google Play. Especially Apple communicates it clearly by not including PWA feats into Safari.
Progressive web application. Basically standard websites, but can be installed locally and used offline, and can use standard APIs to access system resources like storage.
Flutter: you took everything from me!
Software development community at large: i don't even know who you are.
i certainly hope so
My company will take flutter forward just in case google drops it. 🤟🤟 Would not invest millions on flutter but will be driven by some donations by community, some donation and regular hardwork from our side. Lets hope google keeps this on their side
Well, no. flutter came to stay unfortunately. You don't want to learn it fine. But flutter came to stay, there is no sign it's not gonna be backed by google. Even if that was the case, the community would forever run it like react native.
Pub G ,bitget
I think this article has it completely backward. I had always figured that Google planned to eventually make Flutter the primary framework for Android dev. Keep in mind, Flutter works on desktop and mobile. They even use it for all of the UI in their Fuschia-based devices. Not to mention that flutter and Dart should provide better performance than Kotlin since Kotlin runs on the JVM.
Without even reading, yes, since it's being backed by Google
Go, you're next.
go "made it" imo. too much momentum. it will live regardless of google's wishes, even if it has a permanent limp.
Hint: It's not. Not even close.
Well, Google runs it so ... https://killedbygoogle.com/
This shit is so silly, 99% of those "projects" there are random useless shit.
MS kills a lot of stuff, so does Amazon and Meta and every other big company
Flutter isn't a small little sideproject, it's already an entire ecosystem by itself, Google can "let go" but it will live on.
Why did you need to omit the title punctuation?
I enjoyed working with Flutter and Dart. Mobile app dev was a breeze compared to Android Studio for my CS classes. Hope Google doesn’t kill it off
Explain this please
Flutter and Dart have always been very appealing to me. That being said; I have zero faith in Google when it comes to development platforms. They’re just too flakey for me to invest my time in. They’ll drop great tech like a bad habit, out of nowhere.