eseidel

Flutter Founder here. I'm very pro open-source, and pro taking-action, so hopefully good things will come out of it. I think this particular author is mostly stirring up a bunch of noise and does not represent a significant chunk of the community, but we'll see. :shrug:

https://flutter.dev/showcase has a few examples. Flutter is everywhere at this point. TikTok in China (Douyin), PUBG Mobile, MGM Resorts, eBay Motors, Kijiji.com, Grab are a few off the top of my head. And of course a whole bunch of Google apps (GPay, Earth, Classroom, etc.), Toyota cars, LG TVs, Google's own hardware devices, etc. Tonal is probably the app I used most often that's Flutter. Caribou Coffee, Betterment, Norwegian Cruise Lines, NuBank, Realtor.com are other random apps I've used that are Flutter.

Flutter founder here.

When I led the Google team we had pretty good analytics. `flutter` was for a long time opt-out with analytics and would phone home to Google and report usage. We filtered out docker containers and things that looked like CI and saw usage near 1M monthly actives when I left Google a couple years ago. I'm sure it's up since then.

There are 10s of millions of web developers in the world. Doesn't shock me that Flutter could be over 1M monthly (and probably several million annually).

There are just a lot of apps and app devs out there.

It was quite hard, I can attest. :) (Flutter Founder, Shorebird Founder here)

I brought SVG to WebKit, back in 2005. So I guess I'm part of the problem.

I generally agree with the article, SVG is bloated and confused about what it's trying to do.

You're not alone in wanting something better. We had this same problem in Flutter. Ian Hickson (of HTML5 fame) made some attempts at seeing a better future you might be interested in: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1YWffrlc6ZqRwfIiR1qwp1AOk...

Lol. Hixie quit. https://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1700627373&count=1

I'd probably start simpler. I'd just start with either cbracken or matan's rules and see if I could get some basic Flutter projects building nicely with Bazel. Then I'd look to see how it would make sense to integrate with Flutter tools.

I think there are still open questions as to what kinds of projects would want to use bazel. And if they do use bazel, what do they do for all the other services flutter_tools currently provides (like running on a device)? Inside Google they have different (bazel-specific) implementations for "run this app on an android device" so they don't use the `flutter` tool internally I don't think. I do think some of the internal bazel rules might call into `flutter` though? I'm not sure. Those are all question's I'd explore after having some working examples that I could stare at and decide if I liked the DX of them before proceeding further.

Yes. Works with any Dart code (no restrictions whatsoever), including code generation. Also works with flavors.

That’s the intent, yes.

We've seen 1000s of releases in the last year, and not had a single complaint about rejections. In general, Shorebird provides the tech, intended to help you comply with your obligations to these stores. There can be good actors and bad actors with any tech, but we're here to help the good actors, and using Shorebird to violate app stores is explicitly against our TOS.

The stores both have explicit language about updates being generally prohibited unless they use an interpreter or a VM, so long as they don't "significantly change" the functionality of the app. e.g. Apple's agreement: https://developer.apple.com/support/terms/apple-developer-pr... or Google's guidelines: https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answ...

Which we reference from our FAQs: https://docs.shorebird.dev/faq#does-shorebird-comply-with-pl... https://docs.shorebird.dev/faq#does-shorebird-comply-with-ap...

Apps written with a WebView obviously can self-update. Others (as you mention) have offered updater-related products for many years, including Microsoft: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/appcenter/distribution/ina... Large games ship their lua scripts down when you log in, etc. YouTube, Facebook, TikTok are all known to self-update. Self-updating seems to be pretty well established practice.

I agree 100%. Flutter needs a real build system. Bazel could be that? Feels better than inventing a new one.

Google has Flutter and Dart rules, yes, but they were started so long ago (for Google AdWords, which uses Dart on the Web), and historically were very tied to internal Google oddities. If we went with Bazel, we'd just write new ones publicly.

Yeah, we picked "code push" to start with as that seemed to be the common term for similar: https://github.com/microsoft/react-native-code-push

It's possible we'll end up with a more Flutter-focused name like "hot patching" or something at some point.

Every time you launch YouTube, or TikTok or Facebook, or any large game, (or any App with a WebView), yeah. https://docs.shorebird.dev/faq#does-shorebird-comply-with-pl... https://docs.shorebird.dev/faq#does-shorebird-comply-with-ap...

There are also various other commercial services offering code push. Even Microsoft has one: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/appcenter/distribution/ina...

The stores obviously can punish apps who break their terms (not just around updates), but code push is ubiquitous because so many apps need the ability to fix bugs w/o waiting for every single user to click "update" in a store.

YouTube, TikTok, FaceBook (and any large game) have code push. And of course every app that uses a WebView or any other OTA service.

I do think code push is hard to get right. I think that's one of the values hopefully Shorebird can provide, by offering an easy-to-use and easy-to-get-right solution that's accessible to teams who use Flutter, but don't have an extra 10 engineers to write their own code push solution.

I feel very aligned with the stores in that what I want are great apps for users. Having users stuck on buggy/broken apps is a pain not just for companies but also for the platforms and most importantly the users (including from a security perspective).

Desktop is one of our most requested features: https://github.com/shorebirdtech/shorebird/issues/397

I suspect we still have many months of work to do for iOS and Android code push. Mostly a lot of features to build for larger customers.

After that, I'm not sure. We have a long list of ideas. Do you have particular needs around Flutter you'd like us to address?

My understanding is there has been a lot of discussion about this. It's not something I'm actively pushing for.

One of the things I'm excited for with Shorebird is creating an economic entity whose purpose is moving Flutter forward. We're pretty early in our journey, but I would love to see us grow to be "the flutter company" over time.

I think it's still a little early to try and spin Flutter out as a non-profit, but I suspect as more companies contribute to Flutter something like that will happen.