> your team needs to be more transparent.
Unfortunately most of the lack of transparency is not under the Flutter team's control, but I'll see what I can do.
> How is Flutter funded?
A number of companies (Google, Bytedance, and Canonical are three that I know have publicly stated so; there are others but it's up to them to make such statements) employ people to work on Flutter. Hardware costs (CI, source control, bug database, etc) are paid for by Google and Microsoft.
These companies don't typically share more detailed information about how they account for this funding or how much they pay exactly; it's considered proprietary, and often there are legal implications to making detailed statements about this kind of thing.
> It was said a few years ago the budget came from internal projects like ads, fuchsia, pay, and stadia
(I'm assuming you are referring to Google's portion of the funding.) That's not really how Google accounts for things internally. Broadly speaking, the more usage (internal and external) that a product gets, and the more revenue can be assigned to a product, the more Google is likely to fund it. In the case of Flutter, Google is apparently quite happy and has been increasing funding over time as a result, as have other companies (as you can tell by looking at the number of people employed to work on it).
> does stadia being killed effect the Flutter budget?
No, that's not how things work at Google. (I assume you mean Google's investment in Flutter when you say "Flutter budget". Flutter itself, as an open source project, doesn't have a budget currently. Maybe one day we'll have a foundation but right now the additional management overhead doesn't seem worth it.)
> There was an implication at that time that if they all died or left Flutter then it would be killed via budget cuts, is that true?
I think when there were far fewer apps using Flutter, and fewer other companies using and contributing to Flutter, that if Google had stopped using it internally, after a while, it would have become difficult to justify continued investment (since in that scenario, very few people are using it at all, so what's in it for Google? Google isn't a charity). However, at this point Flutter is used a great deal outside Google, as Tim discusses in his comment above, and even if Google itself were to stop using it (which seems highly unlikely) there would still be plenty of justification to continue funding it as a developer product (many of Google's APIs and developer products aren't used internally at all).
That said, this is not intended to be a forward-looking statement (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forward-looking_statement). If you want to ask Google about its future funding plans I suspect the best place to do so is a stockholders conference call.
> Why is Flutter not being adopted by Google for more outward facing apps?
With some exceptions that involve negotiations with the relevant teams, Google doesn't generally talk about what technologies it uses for its own applications. Tim listed quite a few apps whose teams have agreed to publicly state they use Flutter, though. I'm not sure what else to tell you. It's not like Google is making new apps all the time, and rewriting an app in Flutter only makes sense if the app's team benefits from the rewrite in some way.
> Is it seen internally as at risk of abandonment?
No. (But then, why would you take my word for it.)
> "600,000 apps in the Play Store alone", how many of these are commercial vs hobby projects
I don't think this is an axis along which apps are categorized, so I've no idea how to answer that. (What is a "hobby project"? Does it count as commercial if someone charges for their hobby?)
> does Google really care about these if enterprise adoption is minimal?
Yes? We care about all apps.
> Delving into game dev when iOS is not polished seemed like a decision made because there was a need to show potential value via expansion upward in the org, I was concerned this was a hail mary when announced, and with Stadia now gone the timing seems more suspect.
I'm not sure what you're suggesting here. Our work on iOS is entirely orthogonal to the work on the Casual Games Toolkit, it's not like the people who worked on one could work on the other. The Casual Games Toolkit is intended to help people who are interested in writing games with Flutter but don't know where to start; we regularly do surveys of our developer base and this was an area that people indicated an interest in. I'm not really sure what the supposed link to Stadia would even be. Work on iOS continues, and we have significantly grown the team there in the past year.
> "It has a developer base of several million", how many of these are again hobby users
We occasionally post the data from our quarterly surveys to our blog on Medium, the latest post I could find that separates the data by "what is your primary purpose" was the Q3 2021 survey's report and it had this graph: https://miro.medium.com/max/1400/0*_GNHkk5TLOI7wQYc
Looks like it's <50% are "hobby" users and the number is shrinking. That said, we explicitly want to be a project that people use to learn programming, providing a seamless path from "learning" to "hobby" to "professional" so I would hope this number never gets very low.
> how many use it weekly / monthly?
That's very hard to say for a variety of reasons (e.g. many people turn off analytics, analytics are extremely unreliable in general, many people use Flutter via means that wouldn't trigger our analytics in the first place, etc) but my understanding is that as best we can tell, Flutter has well over 500,000 MAUs. I don't think we track weekly numbers.
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