Ask HN: Will Google Abandon Dart/Flutter? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Will Google Abandon Dart/Flutter?

37 pointsram4jesus33 comments

I'm dismayed with Stadia shutdown even if the writing was on the wall and it was obvious to a lot of people.

Will Google ever abandon Dart/Flutter? Say I could land a job on the Dart/Flutter team, would that be a career deadend?

I'm a huge fan of Dart/Flutter but I'm hesitant to continue to use it if that's the endgame.

Don't think so they are heavily invested in it. As Flutter PM wrote here on HN:

The reason you should feel confident to use Flutter is because it's strongly in our business interest to invest in it. Over 600,000 apps in the Play Store alone are already written using Flutter, to say nothing of the countless apps for iOS, Windows, macOS, Linux and web. The list includes big brands like Alibaba, BMW, eBay, and SHEIN. Neither Google as a whole, nor Android in particular would be better off if Flutter didn't continue to flourish.

Aside from that, there are thousands of engineers at Google who use Dart and Flutter internally to build a wide variety of apps. There are many millions of lines of code written that power everything from Ads to our internal CRM system. Google wouldn't be better off if we had to throw all that code away and start over.

Lastly, Flutter is very successful. It has a developer base of several million, is growing quickly, and developers tell us it makes them more productive (https://medium.com/flutter/does-flutter-boost-developer-prod...). Happy developers are a prerequisite for a wide variety of other Google APIs and services, so we have a vested interest in continuing that.

Even if it weren't for Google, there are more contributors to Flutter from outside Google than there are Flutter team employees. Those contributors include big companies like Samsung, Canonical and Sony, as well as prolific individual developers like @a14n (https://github.com/a14n).

Flutter is Googles Trojan Horse to invade Apples app ecosystem. No way they are going to abandon it.

Googles plan:

1. Release Flutter 2. Transition Android to FuchsiaOS 3. App developers migrate Android code base to Flutter 4. Businesses abandon Apples iOS tool chain for Flutter

The key being Flutter is the new “native” standard for Fuchsia

Just knowing how software development works… this will never happen. Few dev shops have the resources, time or inclination to migrate code bases… and for what end game?

I guess Google can dream. But, while where dreaming in hypotheticals…

By that time, apple will have their own search engine along with all of Google’s iOS mobile ad revenue. And today, iOS accounts for 80% of Google’s mobile ad revenue.

And while this migration is happening… Apple’s AR and VR devices will be competing with meta’s… Google won’t even have a device… they’ll be disinter-mediated. And in serious financial decline. As ad revenue evaporates for them.

> Few dev shops have the resources, time or inclination to migrate code bases… and for what end game?

They don't need to convince people to migrate, they just need to make Flutter the most attractive option when starting a new app. At some point it will start to eat their lunch.

The Apple dev story isn't without its own issues either, think about the cahotic migration to swift or the rapidly changing ui frameworks

5. And then they shut it down

Recent statement on HN about Flutter, with discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33028259

This is an excellent link. Thank you.

The writing on the wall for Flutter is the lack of uptake. We are in living in a world of too many ways to make web UIs. Google is hoping to control more of the framework ecosystem by getting everyone on a web UI system that they control. But it's too late for that.

Everyone who writes frontend stuff is sick of new framework and language proposals. I think many of us would rather figure out ways to become more productive and write better UIs in shorter time with the languages and tools we already have. There's just too much of a huge codebase in JS/TS and HTML to ever move any significant amount of anything to Dart and Flutter. There's no upside for the programmers who have to do that work.

Aside from flutter, what open source, truly cross platform dev tools do we have with that level of performance, that are fully supported and not some obscure github page, that integrate with debugging and simulation in the IDE that well? With hot reloads?

Plus, it's a a safe-ish language, it's a pretty nice declarativeish GUI system that is nearly free of manual fussing with positions and sizes, it's got utility functions in the standard library....

It gets basically everything right.

There's lots of ways to make web UIs, but how many can be used on Android all that well?

Flutter pretty much puts the entire dev experience in a box almost like VB did, just 100x better and without the focus on RAD builders.

It's not 500 tools never meant to integrate and linters that can't find your dependencies, everything works together.

If flutter went, I'd be sad. I have never seen anything like it, anywhere.

For me, the answer is bare metal web components with Lit. It's all web standards stuff and not going to change underneath you. With a hot reload server like Vite and writing TS in VSCode, you have amazing developer support. Even Copilot understands web components because they're HTML. I'm faster and write better code with this setup than any UI "framework" that's tied to a vendor.

Personally, I'm over proprietary platforms for mobile and desktop devices. It's much easier from a dev standpoint to deliver everything as a web app.

PS: Here's an intro series [0] I wrote on bare metal web components.

[0] https://medium.com/gitconnected/getting-started-with-web-com...

Remember, Google doesn't care about you.

Let them learn the hard way. I mean the really, really hard way.

100%. My first realization was when Wave was cancelled. Then I slowly came around and they proved me wrong with Google+. With Stadia it's so obvious that Google has contempt for its users; it's the equivalent of the bully tactic 'why are you hitting yourself?'.

Yes, but why are you hitting yourself?

Hahaha. I'm a sucker for pain I guess.

See you at the bottom of the lake, then.

You should diversify. Currently, our company 2HAC Studio have been using some programming languages such as App script for Google Workspace addon, Swift for IOS app, reactJS for Shopify apps, Kotlin for Android apps. We diversify both the programming languages and app marketplaces so we could mitigate risk.

"Don't put all your eggs in one basket."

Too late. You already put all your existing eggs, as well as future eggs that you've promised to others, in this basket. You're net negative eggs now, brother.

egg spiral stagflation

You ever wonder if some people think they have a way with words; instead, these same people are nearly illiterate?

I wouldn’t invest significant time or energy into anything that is primarily driven or funded by Google until it’s very established and somehow making them a boatload of money.

It's not a cloud service, it won't go away if Google quits developing it. Of course it won't get updated, bug fixed, etc.

But GWT isn't particularly alive either :(

I say because I really like(d) it. No idea on or experience with Flutter.

Wasn't GWT supported for like a decade? I don't think it was axed into the Google Graveyard so much as it just aged out.

Which makes it useless the minute any of the compilation targets introduce a breaking change or significant additional UI functionality.

Which often happens with iOS

Nah, continue to put all your eggs in one basket. Remember to count your chickens before they hatch. Always go for two birds in the bush instead of the one in the hand.

Hey, you know that while the Titanic was sinking, plenty of passengers refused to believe anything except that the boat was indestructible. I mean, live and let live. Or maybe, live and let die.

I have this strange gut feel that the only reason Google hasn't killed it yet is because they like to "keep" the brilliant people working on it!

It seems to be in a bubble and nobody talks about it.

Almost like Google is just happy to fund the nerd project to keep the nerds busy.

> It seems to be in a bubble and nobody talks about it

Maybe it's you who's in a bubble?

https://insights.stackoverflow.com/trends?tags=flutter%2Crea...

https://insights.stackoverflow.com/trends?tags=flutter%2Ccss

I mean, eventually.

I predict it will be gone by 2025

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