[Memosyne]

I'll be the contrarian: Is this a good business decision?

Sony has recently stated that it wants to enter the automotive industry but Google is a direct competitor with Waymo and their Nest product has a pretty firm standing in the smart home appliance environment. Is it wise to basically become dependent on a large competitor for such an integral component of your next generation products? What if Google decides to give up maintenance of Flutter to the community and use an internal, better fork? I guess it's the same thing with Microsoft using Chromium to implement Edge and how we're converging towards a complete Google monopoly.

I was an early adopter and proponent of Flutter but that's just not the case anymore. The ecosystem has become inundated by what you might get if you forced copulation between the JS and Android ecosystems. There's a ton of low-substance spam articles, excessive usage of libraries reminiscent of NPM-madness, and just a general obnoxious colorful-emoji-fueled atmosphere. I don't want to be misinterpreted: there are plenty of good Flutter developers and the core engineering team is certainly brilliant. But they're largely overshadowed by a community who continues to drive a good technology into being associated with bloat, poor security, and puerility.

[beckler]

I think it's a side-effect of wider adoption. NPM/Node suffers the most from this. I would also argue that Rust is experiencing a little of this.

[joezydeco]

Fellow contrarian here.

Is this a good business decision?

The slide deck could have just said "We don't want to pay $10/unit for a Qt license" and saved us all the time. If you have half a gig of SDRAM and a playstation-class CPU, awesome. A lot of us don't.

What if Google decides to give up maintenance of Flutter to the community and use an internal, better fork?

I will never touch another Google-generated embedded project again. You will get burned. Just don't do it.

[higerordermap]

> The slide deck could have just said "We don't want to pay $10/unit for a Qt license"

Qt has it's share of problems too. And someone is free to decide against depending on an oracle-like company.

> If you have half a gig of SDRAM and a playstation-class CPU, awesome.

Flutter is AOT compiled in release mode and is pretty efficient.

[malkia]

AOT maybe slower in certain cases. This topic discusses it - https://github.com/dart-lang/sdk/issues/39367 (it's not relevant only to dart, but other languages/runtimes like it too)

[ezconnect]

Sony offer solutions and experience. They have lots of experience doing that. I am sure changing the technology behind their solution will not be a problem as users don't see it at all.

[malkia]

This is just a single engineer from a company that not only makes TVs, console, but tons of other electronic (and possibly non-electronic) equipment. Inside every company, even inside every project, and every team in a any company there might be competing ideas, research and whatnot.

For example we use anywhere from good ole MFC, wxWidgets, WPF, Qt, imgui, Telerik and who knows what else...