[sireat]

Cross-platform development has been the holy grail for some 30+ years.

Alas, I stopped reading the moment I read it is being developed by Google despite the open-source nature.

Being developed by Google it means the chances of a project being discontinued are quite high: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Discontinued_Google_s...

While other big corporate entities have their own share of shut projects (no project is forever) the moment this project stops getting official Google support it will wither and die.

Maybe I am reading this wrong and we could have a Open Office/Libre Office situation.

[mythz]

If Google is developing Flutter so they can be more productive at developing their own flagship iOS/Android Apps than the chances it will be discontinued is quite low.

So whilst it's reasonable to hold off until they adopt it themselves and use it in their own deployed Apps, but once they do I'd be more confident in a commercially-sponsored Google project than an Indie OSS community led project. You just don't hear about the thousands of OSS projects being abandoned because they're from multiple Indie authors.

But I wouldn't trust a project with this large a scope without mega corporate backing. But I'd agree that if Google stops committing resources to Flutter than it will die despite being OSS'ed since it's too big to maintain without a well-resourced team.

Not all Google projects should be considered equal, if adoption is low and they don't have flagship Apps, high-profile initiatives or cost center's backing/funding the project then the project's future would be at risk if it doesn't become successful, but any project that is successful, has adoption or paying customers are very unlikely to discontinued, e.g. Angular, Firebase, Google Cloud Platform or any of their popular platforms, i.e. Chrome, Android, YouTube, etc have zero chance of being abandoned.

[bitmapbrother]

>Being developed by Google it means the chances of a project being discontinued are quite high

Do you also avoid Microsoft products and services because of the chances of a project being discontinued are quite high?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Discontinued_Microsof...

You can also add these to the list:

  Wunderlist
  Sunset
  Games for Windows
  Silverlight
  Zune
  Kin
  XNA
  PlaysForSure
  Flight Sim
  Expression Suite
  SteadyState
  Windows RT
  Windows Phone 7
  Forefront
  Front Page
  Money

Or how about Apple?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_products_discontinued_....

[sireat]

I did say that other corporate entities discontinue products all the time.

I suppose the difference with Google products is that they usually seem "cool" and very promising.

With Microsoft I have no such expectations.