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Comment by skywhopper | Hacker News Reader

Weird, I'd never heard of Flutter (or at least it never registered), but then I'm an infra engineer, so why would I have? But particularly strange is that if you go to flutter.dev, you'll notice you can't find anything about who Flutter is. There's no about page with links to the people behind it, or any indication of what company sponsors it.

Then this flutterfoundation.dev site... weirdly also doesn't say who's behind it. Presumably some outside folks? Maybe just the one person who wrote this blog post? But if it's called "Flutter Foundation" I would expect it to be more officially sanctioned?

Were I in the market for a UI framework, none of this would make me feel very confident.

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Well, myself and a few hundred other contributors are behind Flutter. Happy to answer questions.

The flutter.dev page got rewritten to be more "marketing friendly" a few years back. docs.flutter.dev is still maintained by the engineers however.

Regarding who exactly contributes to Flutter, it's all on GitHub, so you can see the actual committers, e.g. https://github.com/flutter/flutter/graphs/contributors https://github.com/flutter/engine/graphs/contributors https://github.com/dart-lang/sdk/graphs/contributors

As for flutterfoundation.dev, it appears to be just Matt? Who used to be employed at Google and reported to me on the Flutter team but is no longer.

> But particularly strange is that if you go to flutter.dev, you'll notice you can't find anything about who Flutter is.

It's on the front page: "A Global Open Source Community. Supported by Google, open to everyone."

I had to scroll for fourteen whole seconds on my phone to reach that part of the landing page. Completely invisible if you ask me.

“Supported by Google” doesn’t communicate “owned by Google”, and anyway, marketing text in the middle of the page is not particularly telling. I expect a site about some technology to have an About page with some information about who is behind it and who funds it.

Compare https://go.dev/project which explicitly mentions that Google runs the show. The front page makes it clear that Google runs the language’s cloud infra. Plus there’s the Google logo in the footer.

The Flutter page never mentions who runs it. If it’s independent but sponsored by Google, there ought to still be people involved. If it’s owned by Google, it should be clear about it, and not just indirectly mention it.

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