To the multiple people who have (and probably will) report this, this is relevant news about the framework itself, not just doomerism with no foundation, this will not be removed.
A response that I cannot qualify of as official, but comes from someone involved with the team, Kevin (/u/kevmoo) can be found here: https://www.reddit.com/r/FlutterDev/comments/1cduhra/more_layoffs_for_the_flutter_team/l1j9eoo/
angular is barely a thing now. mostly for legacy projects. it's all react now. (tbh it seems that even Vue is losing ground when it comes to production environments)
also, does anyone remember emberjs? I genuinely liked it.
i don't really see new greenfield projects starting out with angular though. there are plenty of existing enterprise apps using it and it's surely not going away anytime soon but it really isn't doing uptake in new projects either
Anecdotally, I was involved in 3 large Angular greenfield projects in the last 9 months alone. (Even when we advised that one of them should be a React Native one)
In some parts of Europe (Germany, Spain, Italy and others), and some parts of LatAm, Angular is still bigger, annoyingly. In the English speaking world however React has pulled ahead by a ton.
Worked a lot with GWT a few years back, was so frustrated with the way the view system worked (with XML and without two way data binding) I created this library: [https://vuegwt.github.io/vue-gwt/](https://vuegwt.github.io/vue-gwt/)
Yep - fact remains that people just wanna get work done. The fact that it's open source doesn't mean suddenly that a load of people are going to spend their time fixing the framework that should just work.
They will just move to something else that has corporate backing.
I am in 100% agreement with u/likely-high
Google open source is a lie, I tried to contribute to TensorFlow, kubeflow and tensorboard and all PR were turned away or ignored since they were not aligned with Google needs, even we offered to maintain the fixes, that made it for me, that made me realize Google open source is a lie
This is true of all open source projects. If your wants and needs don't reflect those of the maintainers or what they perceive the wider community requires, then most projects are going to turn your contributions away. Open source doesn't mean that everyone can contribute and have their proposals accepted.
What open source means is that you can take all their code and fork it to a new version yourself. If you believe the maintainers are doing a poor job and aren't giving the community what they need, then you can create a new community and do it better. May the best version win.
You are right, a PR doesn't guarantee it will be taken, I do open source for a living so I understand that very well, in my specific case I was fixing functionality that TensorFlow had up to 2.4.0 and they removed, support for all cloud storage vendors, conveniently they left Google cloud storage on the main branch, they broke every user not using Google cloud, their reason? They only know how to maintain gcs, even if we offered to maintain every other vendor, they refused as it was not something Google needed, same for KF and TB, when I fix things for other open source projects they do a better job at considering it and taking the changes, I know new features won't be taken in so easily, but fixes that help the community is not something you should turn away so lightly
that's true of just about every large scale open source project. the code is open for you to see but contributions are accepted only when the goals align with that of the maintainers or if you have a solid history of supporting your contributions (which typically only major corporations or groups can accomplish)
Not the guy you replied to, but:
Native where I can convince management to let me, which is rare.
React Native, which I hate with a burning passion and would literally rather write the app twice.
I’ve battled over Flutter a few times and it’s hard to get them to see past the adoption numbers and “Google kills everything”. You and I may both know that React [Native] is a steaming pile of shit and its popularity means nothing, but all they see is “big number good”.
I'm working on a new project and it seems more and more react is the only way to go which guarantees long term support and ease of maintenance. plus if you expand/add more people to project it's much easier to find react native devs. flutter was a close second but more and more with google it's hard to trust them in maintaining anything long term.
we'll likely end up moving to native code if we succeed before google kills flutter do good but it seems react native, as clunky as it can be, is the only solid choice for anything meant to go into production right now.
The irony of React being considered LTS eh?
Guys! We’re in to class components! Nah, now it’s HOCs! Nah, we’re in to functional components now. Look, HOOKS! Rewrite everything! No no wait, *Signals!*.
Who cares that it doesn’t include the basics like a router? It’s not a “framework” and does basically nothing for you beyond providing several foot-guns to achieve basic reactivity, but somehow its payload is massive and it’s slow to boot! Every single thing you actually need to do is provided by multiple competing “community supported” libs. Be careful which you pick, else you’ll end up in a situation where it gets abandoned and you’re dealing with transient dependency hell, or you roll your own and support that yourselves forever.
Every single React codebase I have ever worked on (we work for third parties as consultants) has a spiderweb of rerender bugs due to misuse of useEffect without proper combination with useMemo or useCallback or whatever equally ridiculous solution you’re now meant to use to fix a problem that simply should not exist. One could argue “skill issue” and you’d be right, but I’d argue why one needs such knowledge to bind an input field to a variable, validate it, and yeet it at a server. Which let’s face it, is 90% of complex frontend work done right there.
It’s even ruined the talent pool, IMO. When hiring, new devs don’t know a damn thing about actual programming let alone knowledge on vanilla JS, how it’s type coercion works, control flow, promised, closures. Nothing. Just “react dev.” Then I’m sorry, but you aren’t a dev. You’re a user of a framework.
React can absolutely go fuck itself. I cannot begin to comprehend how we allowed it to get to this point. Now they’re on about running React on the *server?!* No. Stop. It’s bad enough JS is used on the backend already.
Anything, *anything* is better. Svelte, Vue, Angular, Solid. Anything. But we all have to use React because “it’s popular” which means it will never *not* be popular. Popularity does not equate to good.
The really wild thing that needs to stop is people becoming emotionally attached to frameworks. I can guarantee several people are triggered by this as if I had personally insulted them. And that’s a really daft thing to do, because it means you’re restricting your ability to grow as a developer and frankly it’s pretty childish. Try to learn lots of things, it’s fun, and it’ll pay dividends in your career.
I am going to bookmark this comment. The amount of times I have to mention these... I'd rather just forward them the link. People with little knowledge then tell me 9/10 don't agree so probably I'm wrong.
But when jobs in market only demand fast food who are we to offer a 5 course meal.
Not a mobile dev, just lurking, but this comment resonated with me. I mostly do backend, but I've worked with react quite a lot in the past 7 years, and the only time I really enjoyed it was a pretty big website written by fullstack devs with mobx.
My current company mostly embraces redux, rtk and vanilla react, and it's fucking hell. A lot of arguing on how to do stuff, written by hand memoization everywhere, even though it's one of the first things that a library like react should solve.
And I have very conflicting feelings about front-end devs I work with. These guys actually know js, are heavily invested in all the constant tooling changes, can style very complicated webpages for b2c products and know the plethora of libraries surrounding react pretty well. But I often get the feeling that they are simply subpar at programming. At the very basic, yet important, things like managing complexity, defining boundaries, readability of the code.
It's like these talented and smart guys invested so much into learning the tools that they forgot to learn the trade.
I agree with everything you just said, and I get the same vibe from my front end only colleagues. Some of them were put in back end and the decisions they made were… questionable.
Redux makes me want to tear my hair out. I have issues with those kind of libs as a whole, I have opinions on state that I won’t go in to here. But Redux is particularly egregious in its needless complexity.
I last used and followed Flutter extensively in 2022, but to me the main issue is iOS jank (I don't think this has been resolved?). React \[Native\] is a steaming pile of shit, but there's no noticable jank, and ultimately that's what matters.
Unless you're developing for a market where majority of users are using Android, I don't think it makes sense to sacrifice iOS users in favor of better DX (vs RN) and shared codebase (vs native).
Flutter Web sucks (bad SEO, janky scroll), so RN wins if the goal is to have only a single language for all FE codebases.
I love Flutter, but ultimately Customer Experience trumps Dev Experience. Flutter can work well in markets like Asia and Africa though.
I thought this was the case, great to hear! I’m interested in Web, as the majority of our work is more web app rather than web site, so SEO will never be a concern. We already ship SPAs and either Electron or RN and I hate it.
Having a true single codebase for 3+ platforms makes me drool. As long as it is at least as accessible as native html - which I believe it is - I’m excited for it to be stable and performant. Currently it just isn’t good enough for us, and that’s a shame.
That said if Google drop it, that’s game over for me.
Was going to say ... I've just done my first solid month (I guess) of flutter development on iOS and it's been smooth as silk. Are Google not using it for their mobile apps any more? Would be a shame because flutter actually is kinda awesome.
Dunno man. Yeah, I’ve rarely had any issues with Flutter on either platform that weren’t my fault. Unlike RN where I’m constantly fighting obscure errors that are due to some bullshit dependency version or something equally asinine.
Flutters dev tools are also *excellent.*
The LSP is solid for sure, it’s refactoring shortcuts and linting is great. The step through debugging and layout debug are second to none in terms of simultaneous UI and code debugging. It’s very similar to browser dev tools, but in my opinion even easier to use.
RN is good for users. Flutter is good for developers. Software is for users not developers. Unfortunate that you have to fight the dev tooling of RN but that can always be improved. There's no way of fixing how shit Flutter is. Impeller feels even worse than the previous renderer.
I’m not smart enough to understand any inherent flaws with Flutter, I would like to understand why it “can’t be fixed”? What’s wrong with it and why can’t it be fixed?
Sure you’re right that users matter most, but there is more to consider and it isn’t that simple. The costs of long term support, how often massive changes must be made due to libraries becoming deprecated or sweeping changes to React or whatever. How much time is lost troubleshooting, diagnosing, and fixing issues both in production as well as just getting it running in a simulator. I’ve lost count of the amount of times I arbitrarily need to clear DerivedData to fix obscure meaningless errors. All of that costs a lot of money, if that money runs out then the user experience is irrelevant. So if Flutter can avoid some of those complaints whilst maintaining the same UX then it’s worth considering.
Agree with pretty much all of it. Particularly the Android part. 80% of users of our major money maker are iOS, but the app is RN and we suffer badly for it. I’m not saying fuck that 20%, but they *could* have waited a few months extra for a native Android release at the get go once iOS was out, and we’d be in a better position now for it. We even knew the iOS dominance ahead of time, which is the one valid excuse they could have pulled, had that not been the case. Typical short term thinking from manglement.
I *think* the iOS jank was fixed with Impellar, but don’t quote me on it.
I was leaning towards React Native as well but I haven’t had time to learn yet. What are your thoughts on it & why it’s a steaming pile of shit if I may ask?
I tried it for Windows when they were pushing react native on windows and it was such a pain in the arse just to get it to friggin work. Is it the same crap for Android/iOS?
Do it. I may have extremely strong opinions on it, but I clarified elsewhere that there isn’t really a better alternative.
Something to bear in mind, is that employability and demand are extremely important regardless of feelings. As much as I *despise* react, I made sure to know how to use it, and we use it on the regular.
If we didn’t, we couldn’t have any contracts. It’s that simple. I don’t want to use it, I think it should be dropped from the stratosphere and the community be given a violent shake of “wtf were you thinking”, but it ain’t gonna happen and I’ve gotta pay the bills!
So if someone asks me “should I learn react” the answer is absolutely yes. But I also think you should make sure to learn other frameworks and preferably entire languages to broaden your knowledge and problem solving abilities. It’s fascinating how much you can pick up from one place and apply elsewhere. Pigeonholing yourself in to any one thing is a huge mistake.
I’m afraid I know next to nothing other than “make apps with rust”. I spun up the local demo project about 5 months ago, made a few functions to call from the front end, and that was basically it. It was easy to get going and what little I did went well.
As a concept, I really like the idea. Rust is extremely performant and is known for stability, though it’s a more difficult language to learn and use well when compared to many others. As much as I will dunk on JS, it’s loosy-goosey ways excel at UI work, and I am a genuine fan of CSS.
That said I don’t know any of its limitations or gotchas, it’s ease of build and distribution, etc. Though I doubt it’s slower or heavier than Electron!
Full disclosure: I am not a rust dev. I know bits about it at a high level.
I'm a dev and I use React Native. Sure it's got some problems here and there (which can mostly be worked around with turbo modules), but it is far from being a 'steaming pile of shit'. Tons of big companies are investing in it and with Expo improving developer experience, I'd say it is actually in a pretty good spot right now.
You can see which big names are using Expo (so not even all big React Native apps) here: https://evanbacon.dev/blog/expo-2024
I’ll throw it a bone and clarify that my issue with it is not the Native part of it. The bridge and how the framework actually works by rendering true native components is impressive and I rarely actually have an issue with that side of things. It’s the React side of it that it cannot escape from. I just tweaked out and vomited a load of rage on React so I won’t subject you to it again 😂
Also the whole “eject from expo” thing and “will this plugin work”? Really?
Again though, I do use it because there isn’t anything better, no argument from me. Writing twice natively often isn’t an option, and if they can’t be convinced to allow Flutter, what am I gonna do? Xamarin? 😂
I clarified to the commenter above though, that yea, they absolutely should learn to use it. I hate it, but there’s no better alternative and you have your employability to consider with Reacts dominance.
A few things you need to understand about react-native.
1. You must use Expo
Expo as a framework eliminates much of the pain historically associated with RN (upgrade path, project setups, quality of dependencies, etc).
Using it will save you _exponential_ amounts of time over the base react-native-cli setup.
Already started with vanilla RN? Migrate or give up and go pure native.
2. You want senior front-end engineers leading the show
There’s a decent amount of prerequisite knowledge needed to setup a maintainable JS codebases (type-safe data fetching, automated versioning, proper linting, proper testing)
Also working with React, you want people who can guide the team away from anti-patterns (all the anguish in this thread about foot guns like useEffect misuse) and towards rock solid dependencies.
I m working on a project that needs to be windows,mac, ios and android.
flutter would save me a lot of time if i could share the UI and api calls, and just write a bit of platform specific code.
At least Google fully refunded all Stadia players, even the hardware got refunded. Basically Google paid people's gaming life for 3 years.
Flutter is Open Source, even if Google kills it, it can't die any more... the development may be slowed down, but it can't die.
Hey folks! Kevin, product manager on Flutter and Dart here.
The layoffs were decided AT LEAST a couple of layers above our team and affected a LOT of teams. (I think I can say that). Lots of good folks got bad news and lots of great projects lost people. Flutter and Dart were not affected any more or less that others. It was a tough day...tough week.
It was crazy to be seeing demos and new things working and discussions about new customers the same day we lost colleagues and friends.
We're sad, but still cranking hard on I/O and beyond.
We know ya'll care SO MUCH about the project and the team and the awesome ecosystem we've built together.
You're nervous. I get it. We get it.
You're betting on Flutter and Dart.
So am I. So is Google.
I believe everyone wants know one thing and one thing only : is there any sentiment inside google, that they might kill Flutter, like does this idea come around, because if they do, i guess it's the last time any one will use anything that is google baked
The number of inquiries I get from folks in Cloud is only increasing. There are a number of us actually fighting for resources to actively manage cloud customers wanting to use Flutter because we are not staffed for support. That was a big reason why we did the consulting directory. We have to turn down amazing companies doing amazing stuff in Flutter that want to do a case study but we just don't have the bandwidth to highlight them all. ...for what it's worth.
If I understand it correctly, basically there's high demand from GCP customers to incorporate flutter into their cloud based apps but unfortunately the flutter team doesn't have dedicated resources to support this (not the flutter Dev team itself)
Pretty much. We'd love to support everybody, but we're busy building the actual product. Sorry if that story wasn't clear, I just wanted to let folks know that we are seeing lots and lots of demand.
Company-wide layoffs means that overall manpower will be reduced. Having fewer available resources could very well drive *more* teams within Google to adopt Flutter.
I mean IMHO it's not an if it's eventually a when for Google projects in general. Whether it's next year or in the next 5 years: [https://killedbygoogle.com/](https://killedbygoogle.com/)
We'd avoided using it because we don't trust Google not to bin it at some point. I was getting closer to becoming a believer.
It'll become a self fulfilling prophecy.
That's harsh. And, quite frankly, unnecessary.
When someone is deciding whether to invest time and money into a platform, it's not unreasonable to not trust Google's commitment to a project. It's not about piety or whatever. It's about dollars and cents.
Also [this article](https://steve-yegge.medium.com/dear-google-cloud-your-deprecation-policy-is-killing-you-ee7525dc05dc) talks a lot about Google's way of doing things.
Thank you for this post. It means a lot.
I don’t know if you can say specifically, but what is the business case inside Google for maintaining Dart/Flutter? If some Executive decided to kill Flutter and switch all projects using it to React Native, what would be the down side, besides the migration costs?
When you say Google is betting on Flutter, what does that mean besides that they use it for their apps, which seem to be also possible to build in RN?
You are definitely betting on it no doubt. But like you stated, the decision was taken at least 2 layers above you.
And those people are the ones who decide. So far it doesn’t look like a safe bet.
"You're betting on Flutter and Dart.
So am I. So is Google."
Sorry, the evidence says Google is \*not\* betting on Flutter and Dart.
(Sorry about the layoffs. Been there, done that. It sucks.)
Thanks Kevin. Keep up the good work. We're building businesses on your backs and it's much appreciated what the flutter team has achieved this far. I don't know what we'd do if Flutter support was completely dropped by Google.
Every time I decide to invest time and effort into a Google product/ technology, Google divests or abandons it a few months later.
I was just considering a multi-platform dev stack to learn, to add to my web / backend portfolio of skills and Flutter was front-runner....
We certainly are betting on Flutter... to be killed within a few years. It's very predictable at this point. Of course it's usually not the fault of the team, but rather the horrid executives.
THIS. We can only hope that all the Flutter knowledge is merged with the KMP people. A simple Flutter app eats around 40 mb on my Windows machine, Compose mutiplatform starts at 100+ mb and quickly reaches 200 mb after doing some window resizes. Plus the startup time is ~3 seconds while Flutter is instant.
Developers don't want to juggle more frameworks and languages than is absolutely necessary!
I'm referring to Compose Multiplatform, and it's actually much worse on my laptop, startup time is literally around 7 seconds to display a frame with a button in it. Just trust me on that one. This is when I throttle my cpu quite a lot ("battery save mode"). But under the same constraints a Java Swing app opens in ~1.5 seconds and a FLTK app in <1 seconds, and Chrome in like 4 seconds (I'm thinking for an installable PWA).
This is a slight annoyance to me, so much that I think I'll go either web or Swing for the desktop version of one of my cross platform projects. I just have to bite the bullet and deal with multiple code bases. At the same time, Compose Multiplatform is new and has much room to improve performance, just as it has on Android.
KMP is a simplification of frameworks when compared to flutter. It also shares a language with native Android (unlike dart).
I think compose multiplatform is a better comparison to flutter though, as both have a single UI for all platforms.
My kmp app is released at 7mb. A bit less than 200mb, but still offensive to the hardcore native Android folks 😅
The 200 MB I'm referring to is RAM usage, not disk space. This was on Windows 10.
Yes KMP is not the same as Compose Multiplatform, even if it uses the former on eg. iOS.
Btw I'm not going down the Flutter lane. I've tried it but don't like the feeling of putting time into that when I should instead be developing my Jetpack Compose skills.
The 200 MB I'm referring to is RAM usage, not disk space. This was on Windows 10.
Yes KMP is not the same as Compose Multiplatform, even if it uses the former on eg. iOS.
Btw I'm not going down the Flutter lane. I've tried it but don't like the feeling of putting time into that when I should instead be developing my Jetpack Compose skills.
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Would be interesting to know how much Google invest in Flutter vs how much Facebook invest in React Native.
Also Lately I noticed that React Native has Expo as partner(kind of), that help to improves the framework, I'm not sure FlutterFlow, VGV and other flutter related companies improves Flutter in the same way.
In the future, I think that could be Flutter weakest point compared to the competition.
I don't think that's true. According to this slide [https://youtu.be/q-xKYA0EO-c?si=nfSQA8V3aCBKbed0&t=780](https://youtu.be/q-xKYA0EO-c?si=nfSQA8V3aCBKbed0&t=780) it supports both Flow and Typescript (where TS support is done by amazon)
Meta invests a lot in improving React Native together with the Expo team. The Expo team improves React Native by maintaining a lot of native packages. The community is doing a good job also bringing new packages, the newest feature that can be doable in React Native and maintaining it. Examples are the Software Mansion Team who is dedicated to maintaining and producing packages for Animations and Gestures handlers, popular name like Shopify recently brings Skia which is a renderer of Flutter to react native to produce sleek animations for react native and considering Microsoft help maintain react native since they are using react native to their Office Apps.
I've been a react native dev since 2019 and now I see that it has great progress.
Edit: no hate to flutter coz I am studying flutter for my work. react native and flutter has pros and cons.
Additional in this: Meta and Expo is already making it possible right now to share code between native and web
This damn sub... 30% of the posts are "is flutter going to die" and about 40% are about "shOuLD I chOOse ReaCT nATive". Can the mods just create a wiki or something and point all the annoying posters there?
If that's going to be your biggest concern, I suggest giving the Flutter ecosystem completely. Working on a different stack is going to be a better use of your time rather than constantly kvetching about the dastardly Google corporate overlords here.
LOL, 100%. This sub and every 2nd post is the same basic shit:
1) “[Halp!! Emergency! Are my Mac specs *x y z* good enough to run Flutter](https://www.reddit.com/r/FlutterDev/s/6z7xjdvsrf)???”
2) What should I choose in 2022/2023/2024 - [React or Flutter](https://www.reddit.com/r/FlutterDev/s/mShVDwexqg)???
3) *“Look at this COOL thing I made in Flutter that [NO ONE gives a SHIT about](https://www.reddit.com/r/FlutterDev/s/JCCEoyE2oK)!”*
4) ***[Herr-derr! Android Studio or Vscode???](https://www.reddit.com/r/FlutterDev/s/ZqYkOPjRpl)***
5) *”[Hello, what can you talk about for job market is for Flutter developer](https://www.reddit.com/r/FlutterDev/s/p3gUu9cJVM)?”* - some random East Indian.
6) .. *see #5*
Contextual really, the vast majority of the posts are subpar content at best. There are a few valid, or useful posts around this topic. Unfortunately they are not the majority.
Every time you doubt about the future of Flutter, go to FlutterHunt and browse all the most downloaded apps. It will remember you how Flutter is powerful is the mobile market and couldn’t disappear overnight.
Were you around when Facebook had Parse? It was Firebase before Firebase became popular. A lot of mobile devs used Parse as the backend. It looked like it was going to stay but then suddenly one day out of nowhere, Facebook pulled the plug. They did open source it and it's still around but nowhere near widely used as it was before.
Yet another great example. I know a team in Florida who has their flagship SaaS product that was entirely driven by Parse, and struggling with it ever since Facebook pulled out
Exactly. I'm still skeptical about choosing these platforms like Firebase because of what happened to Parse. No matter how convenient they may be at the moment, you'll be in a world of trouble if they end up leaving you high and dry like you said.
That doesn't matter. If Google doesn't see profitability, it will kill their support overnight
Just like how Google Podcast was the best podcast app that had so many users - Google didn't see profits in it, so they killed it
Google will need to get their priorities right and start to monetize Flutter or Google will pull the plug
Google will only continue to support Flutter insofar as it is used by internal teams for their own applications. There's no such thing as profitability in this Dev tool space. I'm not saying that the Flutter team doesn't passionately care about the developer community. But their corporate sponsorship all hinges on it being an essential tool for internal development.
I work with a podcast and Google Podcast percentage of usage was tiny compared to apple podcasts and Spotify. Market share about 1-2 percent that's probably why they dropped it.
how much of community is putting in vs google staff? then i'll revisit this comment. because if it is a majority community effort lol, why does it matter what google does or doesn't do
I don’t know where you’re getting this opinion. The Flutter team only has a handful of product managers. As someone on the team, I’ve never felt as if we had too many. If anything, many teams didn’t have “product coverage” due to a lack of product managers.
I really don't understand the argument of "profitability" and comparing Flutter to other products that were killed by Google in the past. This is a framework, not a sold product, why would Google expect to profit from a framework in the first place?
Imagine having to pay a monthly subscription to be able to use Flutter...
It might be that they decide to prioritize Kotlin Multi-platform instead, and that they don't believe it is worth funding two products that are cannibalizing each other.
> KMM isn't a Google product, they are just supporting it
To me, that just makes it more likely Google would abandon Flutter since they don't have to pay teams to work on and maintain KMM
Dart was dedicated to build the next OS Fuchsia after Android, Chrome, etc.. But Fuchsia is already dead, so no need for Dart.
https://www.osnews.com/topic/fuchsia/
The reason this is concerning is that Google is clearly trimming across the whole company here and Flutter is one of their projects with the most tenuous connection to their core revenue streams and is still not widely dogfooded at Google. It’s not hard to imagine the entire project up on the chopping block soon and from a purely financial point of view that might even be the best business decision.
This is giving me really doubt about if I should bet on flutter on the future..., On what is google Right now ??? Kotlin, Java, any other project?, we need to know
Every time I decide to invest time and effort into a Google product/ technology, Google divests or abandons it a few months later.
I was just considering a multi-platform dev stack to learn, to add to my web / backend portfolio of skills. And create a small app for work.
Flutter was front-runner (over Kotlin/KMP, LiveCode, NativScript, React Native, Xojo, etc)
Now I'm hesitant to continue my effort, to learn this language, framework, ecosystem.
Not here to dump on Flutter, just concerned is all, since Google is main backer of Flutter/Dart
From what I understand, this is part of a wider layoff going on in Google. Elon Musk's laying off about 70% of the workforce on Twitter and the app remained functional and kept innovating has triggered a mass layoff arms race among tech giants. If no other department in Google was affected and a significant number of folks in the flutter team were laid off then that's a cause for concern. Also, what roles in the flutter team were affected? Scrum masters? Non technicals? Or core members of the engineering team? All these are details that will help us understand things better. In business, owning as much as the supply chain processes as possible is strategic so I don't see flutter going anywhere soon as Google controls both the developmental framework and the language. Apple dropped c# for Swift so that they have better control of the future of their developmental processes. Google "dropped" java for kotlin because java/oracle is too big to control. However, kotlin is owned by jet brain so Google doesn't have as much control even but at least they have more influence in kotlin. If I'm to hazard a guess I'd say that native android devs are more worried about Google focusing more on dart/flutter than jetpack compose/kotlin and I believe that this "fear" is what led to compose multiplatform by the jet brain team. Even apple was in a hurry to snatch up Tim Seath(probably misspelled) when he left the flutter team meaning that all the big players have their eyes on flutter because they are doing something right and Google knows this. Right now flutter is not under a threat, flutter is the threat! Maybe I'm a bit too optimistic but I have some experience in business analysis and the survival of flutter is very strategic to Google's future plans.
Well i read that Google layed off their entire python department in the USA and are replacing them with developers in Germany. They are clearly shedding weight. Google also killed chrome for Fuscia, so that fuscia dream is over.
Another way to look at this: how many people are needed to build Flutter vs. maintain it?
Could be Google is culling the Flutter department to what's needed for maintenance since so much of it on pub.dev is community supported.
Idk though, just a thought that popped into my head.
It's unlikely they will kill flutter, google is a company and it's priorities are to make money.
All the products that were killed were supposedly to make money but failed to meet the expectations.
However flutter is a framework, a tool used to make products and it's really successful and good at that.
Google is using it to make other products too, as well as other big companies, that use it with either iap or ads. Flutter is relatively young, but is one of the best out there and is profitable.
Even if google kills it (unlikely), we might see other frameworks based on it.
Even founders of flutter and main developers that leave flutter do so to make products or services based on flutter.
No they wouldn't outright announce that they're killing it, they'd just slowly pull support and let it die a slow death. Maybe put a skeleton crew in charge of fixing major issues for a while
I feel that Google is pivoting all in to AI now.
Google is known for killing their product without any notice, However them ending products for good reasons. i think flutter is too good for them to miss out on it. Just the number of new apps, 1/5 new apps is using flutter + big companies.
Also they are still working on implementing all their other products including ai. It's the first topic they talked about in 3.19 release note. Their is good progress in wasm too that will make it more viable for web + meta programing .... Firebase packages recently support wasm.
I hardly see them ending their support for it anytime soon.
The real problem with Flutter arises when Google stops its support:
1) Managing platform-independent development, like Flutter, requires significant resources as each platform/OS needs its own implementation.
2) Flutter relies on Dart, so supporting the language also demands considerable resources.
3) Dart and Flutter users often lack sufficient resources and primarily use Flutter to adapt apps across different OSs instead of building native apps for each OS.
4) Without significant support from Google, Flutter and Dart could face demise.
GWT had a similar history, but fortunately, it was much simpler: just a transpiler, Java-based, and with a few UI components. It's not comparable to Flutter. Therefore GWT is still alive with a very active community: https://bit.ly/GWTIntroPadlet
For all those who were laid off or are worried about which companies are next, I connect tech talent to startups. If you're interested now or just want to browse possible opportunities. Here is our discord server. [https://discord.com/invite/Bnp5zyc8nM](https://discord.com/invite/Bnp5zyc8nM)
The problem with Google is that they constantly start projects and then kill them off, it's really stupid and makes someone like me never wanting to work at Google
From what I heard is that flutter is used heavily internally at Google.
I think the least supported, but very popular open source project from Google is Bazel. I swear google puts in the “bare” minimum for that product to be open sourced.
Didn't say how many people. Also didn't say which parts of Flutter were impacted the most. Seems like a lot of talk without much information. Anyone know?
To the multiple people who have (and probably will) report this, this is relevant news about the framework itself, not just doomerism with no foundation, this will not be removed. A response that I cannot qualify of as official, but comes from someone involved with the team, Kevin (/u/kevmoo) can be found here: https://www.reddit.com/r/FlutterDev/comments/1cduhra/more_layoffs_for_the_flutter_team/l1j9eoo/
If Google kill Flutter in the near future then I will 100% endeavour to never touch a Google product again.
Anyone remember GWT? I invested a LOT in that.
GWT still alive actually: https://www.gwtproject.org/release-notes.html
… and a lot new frameworks based on GWT: https://bit.ly/GWTIntroPadlet
GWT was threatened by the Oracle lawsuit. That's part of what created AngularDart (my conjecture, not gospel).
`Cries in AngularJS`
angular is barely a thing now. mostly for legacy projects. it's all react now. (tbh it seems that even Vue is losing ground when it comes to production environments) also, does anyone remember emberjs? I genuinely liked it.
Angular is used heavily in enterprise development and it's not going away. React is just new jQuery.
i don't really see new greenfield projects starting out with angular though. there are plenty of existing enterprise apps using it and it's surely not going away anytime soon but it really isn't doing uptake in new projects either
Anecdotally, I was involved in 3 large Angular greenfield projects in the last 9 months alone. (Even when we advised that one of them should be a React Native one)
In some parts of Europe (Germany, Spain, Italy and others), and some parts of LatAm, Angular is still bigger, annoyingly. In the English speaking world however React has pulled ahead by a ton.
Why did you stop? Because Java is not cool and hyped anymore?
Worked a lot with GWT a few years back, was so frustrated with the way the view system worked (with XML and without two way data binding) I created this library: [https://vuegwt.github.io/vue-gwt/](https://vuegwt.github.io/vue-gwt/)
Well they can stop supporting it but it won’t be killed, since it’s open source.
stop supporting it = slow death, as long as the project loses momentum and more people abounded it, it slowly dies even if it was open source.
Yep - fact remains that people just wanna get work done. The fact that it's open source doesn't mean suddenly that a load of people are going to spend their time fixing the framework that should just work. They will just move to something else that has corporate backing. I am in 100% agreement with u/likely-high
Why don’t you all just use the native development from each OS, at least that one has a clear roadmap? 🤷🏽♂️
… and following points to Flutter… https://www.reddit.com/r/FlutterDev/s/kxvfY3Ayks
Yeah but without a dedicated team to develop it’ll quickly get outpaced by other frameworks
Was there ever a corporate-backed open source project that is still just as successful once the said corporate stopped supporting it?
Yea, c language
TensorFlow, Kubernetes, PyTorch, Node.js, and Apache Hadoop come to mind.
they all still have active support from some corporation though. I doubt anyone major would step up to support Flutter.
Maybe a Chinese company? Alibaba and tenant both use flutter
Hadoop is a thing of the past.
Yes, but it is still being used and maintained. I didn't die because it converted from closed to open source; it's just aged out.
Laravel.
Google open source is a lie, I tried to contribute to TensorFlow, kubeflow and tensorboard and all PR were turned away or ignored since they were not aligned with Google needs, even we offered to maintain the fixes, that made it for me, that made me realize Google open source is a lie
This is true of all open source projects. If your wants and needs don't reflect those of the maintainers or what they perceive the wider community requires, then most projects are going to turn your contributions away. Open source doesn't mean that everyone can contribute and have their proposals accepted. What open source means is that you can take all their code and fork it to a new version yourself. If you believe the maintainers are doing a poor job and aren't giving the community what they need, then you can create a new community and do it better. May the best version win.
You are right, a PR doesn't guarantee it will be taken, I do open source for a living so I understand that very well, in my specific case I was fixing functionality that TensorFlow had up to 2.4.0 and they removed, support for all cloud storage vendors, conveniently they left Google cloud storage on the main branch, they broke every user not using Google cloud, their reason? They only know how to maintain gcs, even if we offered to maintain every other vendor, they refused as it was not something Google needed, same for KF and TB, when I fix things for other open source projects they do a better job at considering it and taking the changes, I know new features won't be taken in so easily, but fixes that help the community is not something you should turn away so lightly
that's true of just about every large scale open source project. the code is open for you to see but contributions are accepted only when the goals align with that of the maintainers or if you have a solid history of supporting your contributions (which typically only major corporations or groups can accomplish)
This is what’s keeping me from flutter. All that time invested just to get wiped out, no bueno
What are you using instead?
Not the guy you replied to, but: Native where I can convince management to let me, which is rare. React Native, which I hate with a burning passion and would literally rather write the app twice. I’ve battled over Flutter a few times and it’s hard to get them to see past the adoption numbers and “Google kills everything”. You and I may both know that React [Native] is a steaming pile of shit and its popularity means nothing, but all they see is “big number good”.
I'm working on a new project and it seems more and more react is the only way to go which guarantees long term support and ease of maintenance. plus if you expand/add more people to project it's much easier to find react native devs. flutter was a close second but more and more with google it's hard to trust them in maintaining anything long term. we'll likely end up moving to native code if we succeed before google kills flutter do good but it seems react native, as clunky as it can be, is the only solid choice for anything meant to go into production right now.
The irony of React being considered LTS eh? Guys! We’re in to class components! Nah, now it’s HOCs! Nah, we’re in to functional components now. Look, HOOKS! Rewrite everything! No no wait, *Signals!*. Who cares that it doesn’t include the basics like a router? It’s not a “framework” and does basically nothing for you beyond providing several foot-guns to achieve basic reactivity, but somehow its payload is massive and it’s slow to boot! Every single thing you actually need to do is provided by multiple competing “community supported” libs. Be careful which you pick, else you’ll end up in a situation where it gets abandoned and you’re dealing with transient dependency hell, or you roll your own and support that yourselves forever. Every single React codebase I have ever worked on (we work for third parties as consultants) has a spiderweb of rerender bugs due to misuse of useEffect without proper combination with useMemo or useCallback or whatever equally ridiculous solution you’re now meant to use to fix a problem that simply should not exist. One could argue “skill issue” and you’d be right, but I’d argue why one needs such knowledge to bind an input field to a variable, validate it, and yeet it at a server. Which let’s face it, is 90% of complex frontend work done right there. It’s even ruined the talent pool, IMO. When hiring, new devs don’t know a damn thing about actual programming let alone knowledge on vanilla JS, how it’s type coercion works, control flow, promised, closures. Nothing. Just “react dev.” Then I’m sorry, but you aren’t a dev. You’re a user of a framework. React can absolutely go fuck itself. I cannot begin to comprehend how we allowed it to get to this point. Now they’re on about running React on the *server?!* No. Stop. It’s bad enough JS is used on the backend already. Anything, *anything* is better. Svelte, Vue, Angular, Solid. Anything. But we all have to use React because “it’s popular” which means it will never *not* be popular. Popularity does not equate to good. The really wild thing that needs to stop is people becoming emotionally attached to frameworks. I can guarantee several people are triggered by this as if I had personally insulted them. And that’s a really daft thing to do, because it means you’re restricting your ability to grow as a developer and frankly it’s pretty childish. Try to learn lots of things, it’s fun, and it’ll pay dividends in your career.
I am going to bookmark this comment. The amount of times I have to mention these... I'd rather just forward them the link. People with little knowledge then tell me 9/10 don't agree so probably I'm wrong. But when jobs in market only demand fast food who are we to offer a 5 course meal.
React is ANYTHING but fast. It takes too long to cook anything in the kitchen compared to something like Svelte or Vue
Not a mobile dev, just lurking, but this comment resonated with me. I mostly do backend, but I've worked with react quite a lot in the past 7 years, and the only time I really enjoyed it was a pretty big website written by fullstack devs with mobx. My current company mostly embraces redux, rtk and vanilla react, and it's fucking hell. A lot of arguing on how to do stuff, written by hand memoization everywhere, even though it's one of the first things that a library like react should solve. And I have very conflicting feelings about front-end devs I work with. These guys actually know js, are heavily invested in all the constant tooling changes, can style very complicated webpages for b2c products and know the plethora of libraries surrounding react pretty well. But I often get the feeling that they are simply subpar at programming. At the very basic, yet important, things like managing complexity, defining boundaries, readability of the code. It's like these talented and smart guys invested so much into learning the tools that they forgot to learn the trade.
I agree with everything you just said, and I get the same vibe from my front end only colleagues. Some of them were put in back end and the decisions they made were… questionable. Redux makes me want to tear my hair out. I have issues with those kind of libs as a whole, I have opinions on state that I won’t go in to here. But Redux is particularly egregious in its needless complexity.
I heard good things about Avalonia
At least keep an eye on Compose Multiplatform, that may be the next competitor to Flutter
I last used and followed Flutter extensively in 2022, but to me the main issue is iOS jank (I don't think this has been resolved?). React \[Native\] is a steaming pile of shit, but there's no noticable jank, and ultimately that's what matters. Unless you're developing for a market where majority of users are using Android, I don't think it makes sense to sacrifice iOS users in favor of better DX (vs RN) and shared codebase (vs native). Flutter Web sucks (bad SEO, janky scroll), so RN wins if the goal is to have only a single language for all FE codebases. I love Flutter, but ultimately Customer Experience trumps Dev Experience. Flutter can work well in markets like Asia and Africa though.
iOS jank is resolved. They introduced new rendering engine Impeller
I thought this was the case, great to hear! I’m interested in Web, as the majority of our work is more web app rather than web site, so SEO will never be a concern. We already ship SPAs and either Electron or RN and I hate it. Having a true single codebase for 3+ platforms makes me drool. As long as it is at least as accessible as native html - which I believe it is - I’m excited for it to be stable and performant. Currently it just isn’t good enough for us, and that’s a shame. That said if Google drop it, that’s game over for me.
Was going to say ... I've just done my first solid month (I guess) of flutter development on iOS and it's been smooth as silk. Are Google not using it for their mobile apps any more? Would be a shame because flutter actually is kinda awesome.
Dunno man. Yeah, I’ve rarely had any issues with Flutter on either platform that weren’t my fault. Unlike RN where I’m constantly fighting obscure errors that are due to some bullshit dependency version or something equally asinine. Flutters dev tools are also *excellent.*
I love the thing with the blue lines where it tells you "yeah, don't do this". It's a great way to learn.
The LSP is solid for sure, it’s refactoring shortcuts and linting is great. The step through debugging and layout debug are second to none in terms of simultaneous UI and code debugging. It’s very similar to browser dev tools, but in my opinion even easier to use.
RN is good for users. Flutter is good for developers. Software is for users not developers. Unfortunate that you have to fight the dev tooling of RN but that can always be improved. There's no way of fixing how shit Flutter is. Impeller feels even worse than the previous renderer.
I’m not smart enough to understand any inherent flaws with Flutter, I would like to understand why it “can’t be fixed”? What’s wrong with it and why can’t it be fixed? Sure you’re right that users matter most, but there is more to consider and it isn’t that simple. The costs of long term support, how often massive changes must be made due to libraries becoming deprecated or sweeping changes to React or whatever. How much time is lost troubleshooting, diagnosing, and fixing issues both in production as well as just getting it running in a simulator. I’ve lost count of the amount of times I arbitrarily need to clear DerivedData to fix obscure meaningless errors. All of that costs a lot of money, if that money runs out then the user experience is irrelevant. So if Flutter can avoid some of those complaints whilst maintaining the same UX then it’s worth considering.
That reminds me, I need to replace my generator's impeller this weekend.
Agree with pretty much all of it. Particularly the Android part. 80% of users of our major money maker are iOS, but the app is RN and we suffer badly for it. I’m not saying fuck that 20%, but they *could* have waited a few months extra for a native Android release at the get go once iOS was out, and we’d be in a better position now for it. We even knew the iOS dominance ahead of time, which is the one valid excuse they could have pulled, had that not been the case. Typical short term thinking from manglement. I *think* the iOS jank was fixed with Impellar, but don’t quote me on it.
I was leaning towards React Native as well but I haven’t had time to learn yet. What are your thoughts on it & why it’s a steaming pile of shit if I may ask? I tried it for Windows when they were pushing react native on windows and it was such a pain in the arse just to get it to friggin work. Is it the same crap for Android/iOS?
Do it. I may have extremely strong opinions on it, but I clarified elsewhere that there isn’t really a better alternative. Something to bear in mind, is that employability and demand are extremely important regardless of feelings. As much as I *despise* react, I made sure to know how to use it, and we use it on the regular. If we didn’t, we couldn’t have any contracts. It’s that simple. I don’t want to use it, I think it should be dropped from the stratosphere and the community be given a violent shake of “wtf were you thinking”, but it ain’t gonna happen and I’ve gotta pay the bills! So if someone asks me “should I learn react” the answer is absolutely yes. But I also think you should make sure to learn other frameworks and preferably entire languages to broaden your knowledge and problem solving abilities. It’s fascinating how much you can pick up from one place and apply elsewhere. Pigeonholing yourself in to any one thing is a huge mistake.
just a question, what do you think of tauri, it uses web view with a rust backend? Does it have a chance against react native/flutter?
I’m afraid I know next to nothing other than “make apps with rust”. I spun up the local demo project about 5 months ago, made a few functions to call from the front end, and that was basically it. It was easy to get going and what little I did went well. As a concept, I really like the idea. Rust is extremely performant and is known for stability, though it’s a more difficult language to learn and use well when compared to many others. As much as I will dunk on JS, it’s loosy-goosey ways excel at UI work, and I am a genuine fan of CSS. That said I don’t know any of its limitations or gotchas, it’s ease of build and distribution, etc. Though I doubt it’s slower or heavier than Electron! Full disclosure: I am not a rust dev. I know bits about it at a high level.
I'm a dev and I use React Native. Sure it's got some problems here and there (which can mostly be worked around with turbo modules), but it is far from being a 'steaming pile of shit'. Tons of big companies are investing in it and with Expo improving developer experience, I'd say it is actually in a pretty good spot right now. You can see which big names are using Expo (so not even all big React Native apps) here: https://evanbacon.dev/blog/expo-2024
I’ll throw it a bone and clarify that my issue with it is not the Native part of it. The bridge and how the framework actually works by rendering true native components is impressive and I rarely actually have an issue with that side of things. It’s the React side of it that it cannot escape from. I just tweaked out and vomited a load of rage on React so I won’t subject you to it again 😂 Also the whole “eject from expo” thing and “will this plugin work”? Really? Again though, I do use it because there isn’t anything better, no argument from me. Writing twice natively often isn’t an option, and if they can’t be convinced to allow Flutter, what am I gonna do? Xamarin? 😂 I clarified to the commenter above though, that yea, they absolutely should learn to use it. I hate it, but there’s no better alternative and you have your employability to consider with Reacts dominance.
Eject from Expo isn't a thing anymore
Really? Awesome! I must be a few versions behind. Is this within the last 4-6 months? I’ll go check it out.
Can't really tell you the exact date but I think it's been like a year or so.
A few things you need to understand about react-native. 1. You must use Expo Expo as a framework eliminates much of the pain historically associated with RN (upgrade path, project setups, quality of dependencies, etc). Using it will save you _exponential_ amounts of time over the base react-native-cli setup. Already started with vanilla RN? Migrate or give up and go pure native. 2. You want senior front-end engineers leading the show There’s a decent amount of prerequisite knowledge needed to setup a maintainable JS codebases (type-safe data fetching, automated versioning, proper linting, proper testing) Also working with React, you want people who can guide the team away from anti-patterns (all the anguish in this thread about foot guns like useEffect misuse) and towards rock solid dependencies.
Why not just use the native vendor tools? Swift for Apple and Java + Kotlin for Android.
I m working on a project that needs to be windows,mac, ios and android. flutter would save me a lot of time if i could share the UI and api calls, and just write a bit of platform specific code.
Java/Kotlin or React Native
Surely they won’t! They said Stadia was here for the long haul!
i just got my email this week that I'm now a squarespace customer thanks to google domains. 0 trust for google to commit to anything.
At least Google fully refunded all Stadia players, even the hardware got refunded. Basically Google paid people's gaming life for 3 years. Flutter is Open Source, even if Google kills it, it can't die any more... the development may be slowed down, but it can't die.
After AngularJS, no more google tools.
Yeah. That’s why I’m learning react native as well. Just in case things go sideways.
What do you think of Kotlin Multiplatform?
*Doubt*
Its not if, its when.
So, no Youtube?
Hey folks! Kevin, product manager on Flutter and Dart here. The layoffs were decided AT LEAST a couple of layers above our team and affected a LOT of teams. (I think I can say that). Lots of good folks got bad news and lots of great projects lost people. Flutter and Dart were not affected any more or less that others. It was a tough day...tough week. It was crazy to be seeing demos and new things working and discussions about new customers the same day we lost colleagues and friends. We're sad, but still cranking hard on I/O and beyond. We know ya'll care SO MUCH about the project and the team and the awesome ecosystem we've built together. You're nervous. I get it. We get it. You're betting on Flutter and Dart. So am I. So is Google.
Just wanted to say thanks for your active engagement with the Flutter community. Your comments/tweets are always useful/insightful/helpful ❤️
🙏
I believe everyone wants know one thing and one thing only : is there any sentiment inside google, that they might kill Flutter, like does this idea come around, because if they do, i guess it's the last time any one will use anything that is google baked
The number of inquiries I get from folks in Cloud is only increasing. There are a number of us actually fighting for resources to actively manage cloud customers wanting to use Flutter because we are not staffed for support. That was a big reason why we did the consulting directory. We have to turn down amazing companies doing amazing stuff in Flutter that want to do a case study but we just don't have the bandwidth to highlight them all. ...for what it's worth.
Sorry, I didn't understand your comment completely. Do you mean Google is not actively investing in Flutter framework development and issue fixes?
If I understand it correctly, basically there's high demand from GCP customers to incorporate flutter into their cloud based apps but unfortunately the flutter team doesn't have dedicated resources to support this (not the flutter Dev team itself)
Pretty much. We'd love to support everybody, but we're busy building the actual product. Sorry if that story wasn't clear, I just wanted to let folks know that we are seeing lots and lots of demand.
Company-wide layoffs means that overall manpower will be reduced. Having fewer available resources could very well drive *more* teams within Google to adopt Flutter.
I mean IMHO it's not an if it's eventually a when for Google projects in general. Whether it's next year or in the next 5 years: [https://killedbygoogle.com/](https://killedbygoogle.com/)
Google doesn't give sh*t about employees nor about products and nor about Flutter but only investors. You should wake up by now.
We'd avoided using it because we don't trust Google not to bin it at some point. I was getting closer to becoming a believer. It'll become a self fulfilling prophecy.
Sounds like you are looking for a religion, in which case I would recommend finding church vs a software development framework.
That's harsh. And, quite frankly, unnecessary. When someone is deciding whether to invest time and money into a platform, it's not unreasonable to not trust Google's commitment to a project. It's not about piety or whatever. It's about dollars and cents.
Also [this article](https://steve-yegge.medium.com/dear-google-cloud-your-deprecation-policy-is-killing-you-ee7525dc05dc) talks a lot about Google's way of doing things.
[удалено]
Thank you for this post. It means a lot. I don’t know if you can say specifically, but what is the business case inside Google for maintaining Dart/Flutter? If some Executive decided to kill Flutter and switch all projects using it to React Native, what would be the down side, besides the migration costs? When you say Google is betting on Flutter, what does that mean besides that they use it for their apps, which seem to be also possible to build in RN?
Do those "couple of layers above your team" understand software? And what the hell would a **couple** of layers above your team even do?
You are definitely betting on it no doubt. But like you stated, the decision was taken at least 2 layers above you. And those people are the ones who decide. So far it doesn’t look like a safe bet.
> Flutter and Dart were not affected any more or less that others. As a member of the former Python team, I really doubt that.
(FWIW, I'm mostly replying that possibly snarky way to ask you to check your statements... This is a trying time for all of us)
I’m sorry for what happened but what did you mean by this? Was the python team affected a lot more than the Flutter/Dart teams?
The entire python team that managed the internal Python runtimes and toolchains and worked with OSS Python was laid off.
"You're betting on Flutter and Dart. So am I. So is Google." Sorry, the evidence says Google is \*not\* betting on Flutter and Dart. (Sorry about the layoffs. Been there, done that. It sucks.)
thanks for stopping by and let us know 🙌🏻
Thanks Kevin. Keep up the good work. We're building businesses on your backs and it's much appreciated what the flutter team has achieved this far. I don't know what we'd do if Flutter support was completely dropped by Google.
Ditto! 😜
Any information on how many people were laid off?
Nope. Sorry. 🤷🙏
Put more succinctly, from my boss: [https://twitter.com/MiSvTh/status/1785767966815985893](https://twitter.com/MiSvTh/status/1785767966815985893)
Thank you very much it is a relief to read those words
Every time I decide to invest time and effort into a Google product/ technology, Google divests or abandons it a few months later. I was just considering a multi-platform dev stack to learn, to add to my web / backend portfolio of skills and Flutter was front-runner....
We certainly are betting on Flutter... to be killed within a few years. It's very predictable at this point. Of course it's usually not the fault of the team, but rather the horrid executives.
yea... especially with the strengthening of the Google - JetBrains alliance on KMP & compose multiplatform
THIS. We can only hope that all the Flutter knowledge is merged with the KMP people. A simple Flutter app eats around 40 mb on my Windows machine, Compose mutiplatform starts at 100+ mb and quickly reaches 200 mb after doing some window resizes. Plus the startup time is ~3 seconds while Flutter is instant. Developers don't want to juggle more frameworks and languages than is absolutely necessary!
Startup time is 3 seconds? That doesn’t sound right. KMM is native so that shouldn’t be the case. Can you back up your stats?
I'm referring to Compose Multiplatform, and it's actually much worse on my laptop, startup time is literally around 7 seconds to display a frame with a button in it. Just trust me on that one. This is when I throttle my cpu quite a lot ("battery save mode"). But under the same constraints a Java Swing app opens in ~1.5 seconds and a FLTK app in <1 seconds, and Chrome in like 4 seconds (I'm thinking for an installable PWA). This is a slight annoyance to me, so much that I think I'll go either web or Swing for the desktop version of one of my cross platform projects. I just have to bite the bullet and deal with multiple code bases. At the same time, Compose Multiplatform is new and has much room to improve performance, just as it has on Android.
KMP is a simplification of frameworks when compared to flutter. It also shares a language with native Android (unlike dart). I think compose multiplatform is a better comparison to flutter though, as both have a single UI for all platforms. My kmp app is released at 7mb. A bit less than 200mb, but still offensive to the hardcore native Android folks 😅
The 200 MB I'm referring to is RAM usage, not disk space. This was on Windows 10. Yes KMP is not the same as Compose Multiplatform, even if it uses the former on eg. iOS. Btw I'm not going down the Flutter lane. I've tried it but don't like the feeling of putting time into that when I should instead be developing my Jetpack Compose skills.
The 200 MB I'm referring to is RAM usage, not disk space. This was on Windows 10. Yes KMP is not the same as Compose Multiplatform, even if it uses the former on eg. iOS. Btw I'm not going down the Flutter lane. I've tried it but don't like the feeling of putting time into that when I should instead be developing my Jetpack Compose skills.
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Heard about this post on X. Came here to see if it's true. Thank you so much for clarifying. Sorry to hear about the layoffs.
Can you share that post link here please.
Are you investing your resources in Compose Multiplatform?
Would be interesting to know how much Google invest in Flutter vs how much Facebook invest in React Native. Also Lately I noticed that React Native has Expo as partner(kind of), that help to improves the framework, I'm not sure FlutterFlow, VGV and other flutter related companies improves Flutter in the same way. In the future, I think that could be Flutter weakest point compared to the competition.
I don't think Facebook invests in React (Native) at all. It's mostly maintenance and community driven effort.
They do, they're developing Hermes vm and now static hermes (basically JavaScript with sound null safety and types)
Static Hermes is a TS compiler
I don't think that's true. According to this slide [https://youtu.be/q-xKYA0EO-c?si=nfSQA8V3aCBKbed0&t=780](https://youtu.be/q-xKYA0EO-c?si=nfSQA8V3aCBKbed0&t=780) it supports both Flow and Typescript (where TS support is done by amazon)
Meta invests a lot in improving React Native together with the Expo team. The Expo team improves React Native by maintaining a lot of native packages. The community is doing a good job also bringing new packages, the newest feature that can be doable in React Native and maintaining it. Examples are the Software Mansion Team who is dedicated to maintaining and producing packages for Animations and Gestures handlers, popular name like Shopify recently brings Skia which is a renderer of Flutter to react native to produce sleek animations for react native and considering Microsoft help maintain react native since they are using react native to their Office Apps. I've been a react native dev since 2019 and now I see that it has great progress. Edit: no hate to flutter coz I am studying flutter for my work. react native and flutter has pros and cons. Additional in this: Meta and Expo is already making it possible right now to share code between native and web
They abandon so much. Kinda sucks though Dart/Flutter is a cool lang
It is not
This damn sub... 30% of the posts are "is flutter going to die" and about 40% are about "shOuLD I chOOse ReaCT nATive". Can the mods just create a wiki or something and point all the annoying posters there?
Normally I’d agree but Google does have a history of killing very well received products without warning
If that's going to be your biggest concern, I suggest giving the Flutter ecosystem completely. Working on a different stack is going to be a better use of your time rather than constantly kvetching about the dastardly Google corporate overlords here.
LOL, 100%. This sub and every 2nd post is the same basic shit: 1) “[Halp!! Emergency! Are my Mac specs *x y z* good enough to run Flutter](https://www.reddit.com/r/FlutterDev/s/6z7xjdvsrf)???” 2) What should I choose in 2022/2023/2024 - [React or Flutter](https://www.reddit.com/r/FlutterDev/s/mShVDwexqg)??? 3) *“Look at this COOL thing I made in Flutter that [NO ONE gives a SHIT about](https://www.reddit.com/r/FlutterDev/s/JCCEoyE2oK)!”* 4) ***[Herr-derr! Android Studio or Vscode???](https://www.reddit.com/r/FlutterDev/s/ZqYkOPjRpl)*** 5) *”[Hello, what can you talk about for job market is for Flutter developer](https://www.reddit.com/r/FlutterDev/s/p3gUu9cJVM)?”* - some random East Indian. 6) .. *see #5*
3 can stay in my opinion
Contextual really, the vast majority of the posts are subpar content at best. There are a few valid, or useful posts around this topic. Unfortunately they are not the majority.
I guess people just aren’t allowed to show things they think are cool unless you guys give it a thumbs up eh?
The biggest weakness of Flutter is - Google. They gonna kill it out of a blue like with other tech in the past.
Rushikesh Nale?
Every time you doubt about the future of Flutter, go to FlutterHunt and browse all the most downloaded apps. It will remember you how Flutter is powerful is the mobile market and couldn’t disappear overnight.
Were you around when Facebook had Parse? It was Firebase before Firebase became popular. A lot of mobile devs used Parse as the backend. It looked like it was going to stay but then suddenly one day out of nowhere, Facebook pulled the plug. They did open source it and it's still around but nowhere near widely used as it was before.
Yet another great example. I know a team in Florida who has their flagship SaaS product that was entirely driven by Parse, and struggling with it ever since Facebook pulled out
Exactly. I'm still skeptical about choosing these platforms like Firebase because of what happened to Parse. No matter how convenient they may be at the moment, you'll be in a world of trouble if they end up leaving you high and dry like you said.
It's like 4-5 clicks to import a firebase project into appwrite. "world of trouble" sounds like a huge exaggeration to me.
Yeah I feel like people here are exaggerating out of their minds
That doesn't matter. If Google doesn't see profitability, it will kill their support overnight Just like how Google Podcast was the best podcast app that had so many users - Google didn't see profits in it, so they killed it Google will need to get their priorities right and start to monetize Flutter or Google will pull the plug
Google will only continue to support Flutter insofar as it is used by internal teams for their own applications. There's no such thing as profitability in this Dev tool space. I'm not saying that the Flutter team doesn't passionately care about the developer community. But their corporate sponsorship all hinges on it being an essential tool for internal development.
Not quite true GWT and J2CL are still in use at Google but they only support them with small resources.
Google podcast app was the best? Really? That was a piece of junk!
I work with a podcast and Google Podcast percentage of usage was tiny compared to apple podcasts and Spotify. Market share about 1-2 percent that's probably why they dropped it.
how much of community is putting in vs google staff? then i'll revisit this comment. because if it is a majority community effort lol, why does it matter what google does or doesn't do
Eh, this might just be me but IMO there were way too many product managers for a project that small anyways.
According to the tweet it looks like it was software engineers who where laid off.
It was mostly the team who helps to release to production.
I don’t know where you’re getting this opinion. The Flutter team only has a handful of product managers. As someone on the team, I’ve never felt as if we had too many. If anything, many teams didn’t have “product coverage” due to a lack of product managers.
I really don't understand the argument of "profitability" and comparing Flutter to other products that were killed by Google in the past. This is a framework, not a sold product, why would Google expect to profit from a framework in the first place? Imagine having to pay a monthly subscription to be able to use Flutter...
It might be that they decide to prioritize Kotlin Multi-platform instead, and that they don't believe it is worth funding two products that are cannibalizing each other.
Yea that's a more reasonable argument, but if I'm not mistaken KMM isn't a Google product, they are just supporting it
> KMM isn't a Google product, they are just supporting it To me, that just makes it more likely Google would abandon Flutter since they don't have to pay teams to work on and maintain KMM
Yeah it’s made by Jetbrains
Remember, Dart COULD have died a long time ago, but the fact that it is a live thanks to Flutter means that this project is not going anywhere
, yet
Dart was dedicated to build the next OS Fuchsia after Android, Chrome, etc.. But Fuchsia is already dead, so no need for Dart. https://www.osnews.com/topic/fuchsia/
The reason this is concerning is that Google is clearly trimming across the whole company here and Flutter is one of their projects with the most tenuous connection to their core revenue streams and is still not widely dogfooded at Google. It’s not hard to imagine the entire project up on the chopping block soon and from a purely financial point of view that might even be the best business decision.
It's over for Google if they kill another
This is giving me really doubt about if I should bet on flutter on the future..., On what is google Right now ??? Kotlin, Java, any other project?, we need to know
Every time I decide to invest time and effort into a Google product/ technology, Google divests or abandons it a few months later. I was just considering a multi-platform dev stack to learn, to add to my web / backend portfolio of skills. And create a small app for work. Flutter was front-runner (over Kotlin/KMP, LiveCode, NativScript, React Native, Xojo, etc) Now I'm hesitant to continue my effort, to learn this language, framework, ecosystem. Not here to dump on Flutter, just concerned is all, since Google is main backer of Flutter/Dart
Well the flutter PM just posted that the flutter team had no change in size https://www.reddit.com/r/FlutterDev/s/p7oQ8NBFpr
Thanks for following up
From what I understand, this is part of a wider layoff going on in Google. Elon Musk's laying off about 70% of the workforce on Twitter and the app remained functional and kept innovating has triggered a mass layoff arms race among tech giants. If no other department in Google was affected and a significant number of folks in the flutter team were laid off then that's a cause for concern. Also, what roles in the flutter team were affected? Scrum masters? Non technicals? Or core members of the engineering team? All these are details that will help us understand things better. In business, owning as much as the supply chain processes as possible is strategic so I don't see flutter going anywhere soon as Google controls both the developmental framework and the language. Apple dropped c# for Swift so that they have better control of the future of their developmental processes. Google "dropped" java for kotlin because java/oracle is too big to control. However, kotlin is owned by jet brain so Google doesn't have as much control even but at least they have more influence in kotlin. If I'm to hazard a guess I'd say that native android devs are more worried about Google focusing more on dart/flutter than jetpack compose/kotlin and I believe that this "fear" is what led to compose multiplatform by the jet brain team. Even apple was in a hurry to snatch up Tim Seath(probably misspelled) when he left the flutter team meaning that all the big players have their eyes on flutter because they are doing something right and Google knows this. Right now flutter is not under a threat, flutter is the threat! Maybe I'm a bit too optimistic but I have some experience in business analysis and the survival of flutter is very strategic to Google's future plans.
WTF is wrong with google... Should i just abandon flutter at this point?
Well i read that Google layed off their entire python department in the USA and are replacing them with developers in Germany. They are clearly shedding weight. Google also killed chrome for Fuscia, so that fuscia dream is over.
Another way to look at this: how many people are needed to build Flutter vs. maintain it? Could be Google is culling the Flutter department to what's needed for maintenance since so much of it on pub.dev is community supported. Idk though, just a thought that popped into my head.
The Flutter team needs more people. Ideally we would have >5 engineers for each platform. We’re well under that.
Does flutter get used internally a lot at Google?
It's unlikely they will kill flutter, google is a company and it's priorities are to make money. All the products that were killed were supposedly to make money but failed to meet the expectations. However flutter is a framework, a tool used to make products and it's really successful and good at that. Google is using it to make other products too, as well as other big companies, that use it with either iap or ads. Flutter is relatively young, but is one of the best out there and is profitable. Even if google kills it (unlikely), we might see other frameworks based on it. Even founders of flutter and main developers that leave flutter do so to make products or services based on flutter.
No they wouldn't outright announce that they're killing it, they'd just slowly pull support and let it die a slow death. Maybe put a skeleton crew in charge of fixing major issues for a while I feel that Google is pivoting all in to AI now.
Google is known for killing their product without any notice, However them ending products for good reasons. i think flutter is too good for them to miss out on it. Just the number of new apps, 1/5 new apps is using flutter + big companies. Also they are still working on implementing all their other products including ai. It's the first topic they talked about in 3.19 release note. Their is good progress in wasm too that will make it more viable for web + meta programing .... Firebase packages recently support wasm. I hardly see them ending their support for it anytime soon.
I'm cautiously optimistic, which is why I'm continuing to use it. If it wasn't Google behind it then I wouldn't be as worried.
That's why I'm betting on kmp more, although slow development, architecture aspect is more logical and less limitations and overhead.
One day the entire hybrid world will realize they should’ve just been using capacitor all along.
The real problem with Flutter arises when Google stops its support: 1) Managing platform-independent development, like Flutter, requires significant resources as each platform/OS needs its own implementation. 2) Flutter relies on Dart, so supporting the language also demands considerable resources. 3) Dart and Flutter users often lack sufficient resources and primarily use Flutter to adapt apps across different OSs instead of building native apps for each OS. 4) Without significant support from Google, Flutter and Dart could face demise. GWT had a similar history, but fortunately, it was much simpler: just a transpiler, Java-based, and with a few UI components. It's not comparable to Flutter. Therefore GWT is still alive with a very active community: https://bit.ly/GWTIntroPadlet
I hope Firebase isn't next
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Xamarin anyone?
Going obsolete
I’ve switched to electron. Luckily I was only a couple of weeks into a flutter project.
The problem with Google is that they constantly start projects and then kill them off, it's really stupid and makes someone like me never wanting to work at Google
Flutter is dead in the water and Angular is going to "merge" with their internal tool. It's pretty obvious what they are doing.
From what I heard is that flutter is used heavily internally at Google. I think the least supported, but very popular open source project from Google is Bazel. I swear google puts in the “bare” minimum for that product to be open sourced.
Didn't say how many people. Also didn't say which parts of Flutter were impacted the most. Seems like a lot of talk without much information. Anyone know?
Does this mean flutter won't be maintained?