While interesting, I don’t quite understand the “support users per flutter user” concept. There are projects with far, far bigger user bases then 1 million, and the ratios are far bigger then 1:20000, but they still function.
I don’t think that that is a valid support concern. The other comment, by u/adriano above, makes a much better argument than that.
But the number is interesting in comparison. I wonder what the ratio in the iOS ecosystem is. Probably not much better, but Apple seems like a much more vertically integrated company so it doesn’t seem as bad. (Though, there’s xcode so what do I know?)
Maybe I’m out of touch but 1m developers for such a relatively niche tool sounds vastly overblown to me.
I checked the SO developer survey and that has mostly been 60-100k people, and I checked several years of what seems to be one of the biggest developer communities around.. spread over all tech, they have Flutter at 10%.
Posting this one since I’m interested in hearing from any Flutter devs perspectives on it.
My impression was that after Google reduced the Flutter team, either Flutter being shut down or forked became inevitable.
I’m holding a hackathon soon, with a guest speaker from a Flutter game dev framework. I know very little about Flutter, but I am curious if it’s a reasonable thing for people to specialise in, or learn for career purposes. There’s always value in learning, but it’s not all equally valuable for career development. So I’m not sure if it’s something I should steer people towards or not.
My perception of Flutter is very dated at this point (2018-2019), but I figured it might be worth sharing.
At the time I was left with the perception that Flutter came to life less to serve the needs of developers, but to serve a flagging interest in Android as a mobile development target. Android development felt very brittle at the time. (I was an Android user at the time, and developing mobile applications during this period is actually what drove me to iOS. I could see my development pain reflected in many of the apps I used.) Meanwhile, smaller mobile development shops and SaaS startups making difficult decisions about which mobile platforms to target with their limited mobile development capacity were increasingly targeting their MVPs at iOS. Arguably, because a smaller team of iOS developers could turn out higher quality applicaitons in less time and lower ongoing maintenance costs.
So Google came along to give those shops with limited resources a new development target in Flutter. There has long been a “write once run everywhere” goal in software (e.g. Java), and Flatter was aimed at that. It was quite attractive, if only supported by a Google pinky promise. The sacrifice shops had to make was to risk their entire mobile apps on the hope that Google would continue support for Flutter. There’s a pretty extensive history of how well advised that hope is [1]. I personally wouldn’t advise anyone hitch their career wagon to the Google train. Not to say that others haven’t had success doing so, but that such success comes at high risk.
With that said, Google has an ongoing interest in maintaiing Android as a dominant mobile platform, and for that reason, I have a hard time imgagining Google won’t continue support for Flutter on iOS and Android. Any platform not directly competing with Android is likely at risk.
Not a flutter developer but shame it had to come to this. Google could have tapped into a bunch of skilled volunteer contributors. Instead PRs and bug reports are just being left to stagnate. If this gets traction hopefully it’s a wakeup call for Google.
Increasingly does seem short-sighted to trust Google with the stewardship of anything these days. I can’t guarantee they won’t randomly kill off half of Google cloud tomorrow, let alone keep a framework on life support.
We definitely have a long backlog of issues and feature requests. We’re the victim of our own success, we don’t have the resources to fix every single bug or add every feature. That’s one of the benefits of open-source though, if something is important to your organization, you can contribute!
However, we take PRs and contributions seriously. We have triage processes to review contributions within a week. If you have examples of PRs stagnating, please let us know. This would be unexpected and something we should fix.
Why is this buried several levels deep in the conversation?
Ultimately, either the Flutter team has the resources to review contributions within a week, or they do not have the necessary resources. If they DO have the ability to do timely reviews of contributions (and a willingness to accept properly-written contributions), then no fork is needed, although perhaps there IS a need for a group of qualified contributors outside of Google to review issue reports and feature requests and produce working contributions. If the Flutter team does NOT have the ability to do timely reviews of contributions then they either need to cooperate with someone who does have that time, OR a fork is needed.
My only real question in all of this is: what does Bob Nystrom have to say about it? I know this is a flutter conversation, and he’s more of a Dart guy, but still.
Desktop Flutter never really made it to first class status in the first place, so saying it’s been killed seems like overstatement. It was never their priority at all, which always bummed me out as it’s the only place I wanted to use it.
While interesting, I don’t quite understand the “support users per flutter user” concept. There are projects with far, far bigger user bases then 1 million, and the ratios are far bigger then 1:20000, but they still function.
I don’t think that that is a valid support concern. The other comment, by u/adriano above, makes a much better argument than that.
But the number is interesting in comparison. I wonder what the ratio in the iOS ecosystem is. Probably not much better, but Apple seems like a much more vertically integrated company so it doesn’t seem as bad. (Though, there’s xcode so what do I know?)
The ratios for e.g. SQLite and OpenSSH are probably dramatically higher.
Maybe I’m out of touch but 1m developers for such a relatively niche tool sounds vastly overblown to me.
I checked the SO developer survey and that has mostly been 60-100k people, and I checked several years of what seems to be one of the biggest developer communities around.. spread over all tech, they have Flutter at 10%.
That would imply there are less than 10m developers in the world
I don’t think it implies anything, but it’s the only (maybe bad) reference number I could find.
Posting this one since I’m interested in hearing from any Flutter devs perspectives on it.
My impression was that after Google reduced the Flutter team, either Flutter being shut down or forked became inevitable.
I’m holding a hackathon soon, with a guest speaker from a Flutter game dev framework. I know very little about Flutter, but I am curious if it’s a reasonable thing for people to specialise in, or learn for career purposes. There’s always value in learning, but it’s not all equally valuable for career development. So I’m not sure if it’s something I should steer people towards or not.
My perception of Flutter is very dated at this point (2018-2019), but I figured it might be worth sharing.
At the time I was left with the perception that Flutter came to life less to serve the needs of developers, but to serve a flagging interest in Android as a mobile development target. Android development felt very brittle at the time. (I was an Android user at the time, and developing mobile applications during this period is actually what drove me to iOS. I could see my development pain reflected in many of the apps I used.) Meanwhile, smaller mobile development shops and SaaS startups making difficult decisions about which mobile platforms to target with their limited mobile development capacity were increasingly targeting their MVPs at iOS. Arguably, because a smaller team of iOS developers could turn out higher quality applicaitons in less time and lower ongoing maintenance costs.
So Google came along to give those shops with limited resources a new development target in Flutter. There has long been a “write once run everywhere” goal in software (e.g. Java), and Flatter was aimed at that. It was quite attractive, if only supported by a Google pinky promise. The sacrifice shops had to make was to risk their entire mobile apps on the hope that Google would continue support for Flutter. There’s a pretty extensive history of how well advised that hope is [1]. I personally wouldn’t advise anyone hitch their career wagon to the Google train. Not to say that others haven’t had success doing so, but that such success comes at high risk.
With that said, Google has an ongoing interest in maintaiing Android as a dominant mobile platform, and for that reason, I have a hard time imgagining Google won’t continue support for Flutter on iOS and Android. Any platform not directly competing with Android is likely at risk.
[1] https://killedbygoogle.com/
Not a flutter developer but shame it had to come to this. Google could have tapped into a bunch of skilled volunteer contributors. Instead PRs and bug reports are just being left to stagnate. If this gets traction hopefully it’s a wakeup call for Google.
Increasingly does seem short-sighted to trust Google with the stewardship of anything these days. I can’t guarantee they won’t randomly kill off half of Google cloud tomorrow, let alone keep a framework on life support.
Hello, Flutter contributor here!
We definitely have a long backlog of issues and feature requests. We’re the victim of our own success, we don’t have the resources to fix every single bug or add every feature. That’s one of the benefits of open-source though, if something is important to your organization, you can contribute!
However, we take PRs and contributions seriously. We have triage processes to review contributions within a week. If you have examples of PRs stagnating, please let us know. This would be unexpected and something we should fix.
Why is this buried several levels deep in the conversation?
Ultimately, either the Flutter team has the resources to review contributions within a week, or they do not have the necessary resources. If they DO have the ability to do timely reviews of contributions (and a willingness to accept properly-written contributions), then no fork is needed, although perhaps there IS a need for a group of qualified contributors outside of Google to review issue reports and feature requests and produce working contributions. If the Flutter team does NOT have the ability to do timely reviews of contributions then they either need to cooperate with someone who does have that time, OR a fork is needed.
Can we make communication about this work?
What is buried several levels deep? The comment to which you are replying is a reply to a top-level comment, so I would call it only two levels deep.
Sounds like you need to reach out to the author of the article
It’s not only happening there but everywhere in Google’s ecosystem. I completely lost faith in all their services.
My only real question in all of this is: what does Bob Nystrom have to say about it? I know this is a flutter conversation, and he’s more of a Dart guy, but still.
Desktop Flutter never really made it to first class status in the first place, so saying it’s been killed seems like overstatement. It was never their priority at all, which always bummed me out as it’s the only place I wanted to use it.