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Comment by vladdoster | Hacker News Reader

Flutter is a super compelling framework (https://flutter.dev/multi-platform/desktop), but I’d live in fear of it randomly being sent to the Google graveyard.

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It had layoffs in 2024. And Google has emitted a bunch of words about their support for Flutter, but hasn't taken the most obvious step towards solidifying support: guarantee a minimal spend level on Flutter dev for a decade, either internally or by donating to an external foundation. eg we will spend $x on Flutter until 2036. :shrug: So they've carefully retained the option to cut support at will. Which is their choice, but I recently wasn't comfortable starting a greenfield project in it for that reason.

Everyone says this but personally it's been fine for me in 2025. It won't land you a job or funding because people are afraid of it. But if you're going to just build tools, it works.

Sure, but pointing even a single eng team at it is a multi-million dollar investment annually. I can't do that for sdks w/o firm support or enough industry adoption that the industry can shepherd ongoing development.

We shipped a project at work with Flutter recently, specifically using it on embedded Linux, basically a touch screen smart apartment tablet/thermostat combo.

Internally the “UI” team is tiny (basically me, a UI/Designer and one or two other part time engineers) and the productivity is astounding tbh

Which embedder did you guys end up using, Toyota or flutter-elinux

flutter-elinux -- By the Sony guys yea? We use that one!

does it support webview?

Unknown, we don’t use web views at all in our app but I assume it’s possible with some work to get the plugin working

Okay so we ended up using that too, it was really well done and documented.

But in hindsight I think flutter-pi or the Toyota one might have been a better investment. The lead engineer in Sony behind the elinux project left for Nvidia. The Toyota one uses Wayland, you can't make it directly hook into DRM. So you'd need a minimal compositor to get it running.

Flutter Pi had other issues. It required systemd as a dependency just for the event loop which we ended up having to hack out. The Sony embedded project is still being updated and active. And the code quality is much better

Ooof I had a short chat with a maintainer with one of the competing projects and they really hated on the code quality for the sony embedder.

I just didn't like the lack of control you got with the sony embedder, you couldn't specify which display you wanted to show on when using DRM and it was real pain to get it working.

I didn't know about the systemd dependency, but we actually needed it though even though we used Sony because of our dependency on DBus.

> I’d live in fear of it randomly being sent to the Google graveyard.

Knowing Google, this happening is almost a guarantee. You should consider moving to another framework with a longer shelf life.

Go is still going strong after 15 years. Dart, the language of Flutter, is 13 years old.

I do have to wonder if decoupling dart from flutter would boost flutter. Flutter and typescript, dart is fine but you know most people have another major language with tooling and what not

I am primarily an Elixir engineer so Dart was the exact opposite of what I’m usually working in, that said it’s not hard to get up to speed on Dart conventions- and other team members were able to get up and contributing in a couple weeks

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