[mouldysammich]

> We are about to rebuild our Android app in Flutter from scratch now…

Why not use Java/Kotlin if its just on android? Flutter has its advantages sure, but from my experience developing with flutter is the apps end up a bit slower than native, and often you end up interacting with the Java ecosystem on android anyway so the experience doesn't end up being that much better.

[isaiahg]

The message I'm getting from Google is that flutter is the future and will get more support eventually. You can also see it in their fuchsia os which is heavily focused on the ecosystem.

[Illniyar]

I'd be surprised if this actually materializes. Most likely google will abandon the project (whether by killing it or just moving all the talent to something else.

Keeping up to date native Android/iOS functionality by basically reimplementing it bugs and all is an endless demanding work requiring strong talent that will never be good enough for all your use cases and will churn anyone who works on it both from the work itself and the constant complaints of the community.

No other programming powerhouse would be willing to partake in this or even be able to keep up - you won't see an AirBnB, Microsoft or Wix commitment like you did with React-Native, where these companies were active contributors to the core and have low-level libraries of their own.

Google is the last company I'll put my money for doing long term maintenance on an open source project, let alone one with no prospect for monetization or search market-share.

There's really only one way that Flutter survives - and that's if somehow Android moves to it as a first class citizen.

This is immensely unlikely. And probably will doom Android. And in the impossible case where it will - it means iOS will become second citizen.

[schmorptron]

What do you mean by "and that's if somehow Android moves to it as a first class citizen."?

[coldtea]

>The message I'm getting from Google is that flutter is the future and will get more support eventually.

Google has said the same thing for tons of things, and then stop caring for them and supporting them.

Including Dart as a JS alternative, the very same technology now relegated to Flutter backend.

[Turing_Machine]

Right. Google has a long history of scrapping major projects the moment it becomes convenient, even products that have millions of active users (Reader, Wave, Plus....).

I would think long and hard before betting my company on any Google product.

Are there many third-party contributors to flutter? If so, that would make me feel a little more confident. If it's all (or almost all) Google staff, yeah... no. Wouldn't go there.

[sebe]

Ubuntu is doing work on desktop flutter, I recall hearing that they are working on hooking up flutter to accessibility bit of ubuntu.

https://ubuntu.com/blog/flutter-and-ubuntu-so-far

tidbit - there is early support to build linux flutter apps on the raspberry pi. Would be good if android team offered arm builds of their tools, then it would be possible to build for android on the pi.

[codeptualize]

I still miss Google Inbox, such a great product. They just killed it for no good reason. Really sad.

[alasdair_]

Google always has two projects that cover “the future” - one is undocumented and the other was just deprecated.

[JamesSwift]

There is absolutely no way flutter unseats java/kotlin unless it abandons dart and adopts kotlin as its language. Its much more likely that flutter gets absorbed in some way by the android ecosystem.

[chairhairair]

I don't see how it would make any sense whatsoever for Flutter to be "absorbed" by Android, it is entirely independent.

Also, I'd be curious to hear what major advantages Kotlin would have for Flutter. The Flutter team has commented heavily on Dart's useful properties for Flutter's goals (small comment here, there are well written full articles as well: flutter.dev/docs/resources/faq#why-did-flutter-choose-to-use-dart).

The internal investment in Flutter is well beyond the average tech project at Google. I don't expect it to be abandoned any time soon.

[robocat]

From the FAQ “the LICENSE file is 54.3 KB (compressed)” - that is pretty large amount of uncompressed text! I couldn’t find the full licence file (presumably containing all the licences of library dependencies).

[pjmlp]

Jetpack Compose was definitely a counter attack from Android team, with Ads being a big Flutter sponsor and the only reason Dart did not die when Chrome withdraw their support.

So if Ads, Pay and Search keep their support, Dart and Flutter are here to stay.

[schmorptron]

Just to understand this correctly, are you talking about internal debates at google? Like the different teams embracing different technologies for building apps?

[eddiegroves]

Yes, Flutter is “sponsored” by other money making teams inside Google. It is why resources have been spent on Flutter for Web, which no one asked for - the Ads team essentially bought the feature for their usage. This was also how React Native got its start in Facebook.

So my read of Flutter is it’s a way for talent to “ship and get promoted” inside Google or to support other Google product teams. Everyone else is a secondary priority.

[dragonwriter]

> It is why resources have been spent on Flutter for Web, which no one asked for - the Ads team essentially bought the feature for their usage.

“the Ads team at Google” is a very strange thing to treat as equivalent to “no one”.

[karmakaze]

Flutter does away with all the idiosyncrasies of the many Android APIs that differences between Dart and Kotlin seem relatively superficial.

[mkrishnan]

+1 to the dart part.

[iudqnolq]

It's still in Beta, but Jetpack Compose is really nice to work with IMO. If you have a real excuse for a greenfield rewrite, I'd give it a good look, especially if you can afford to wait at least a year before releasing for stuff like a11y to improve.