| > I think the general gist is just the broad question of what can effect flutter funding I mean, I hate to be flippant about it, but honestly the biggest factors in Google's funding of Flutter in the last 5 years have been COVID-19 and Russia attacking Ukraine, along with the subsequent market instability and inflation. > The hobby projects, I think this is hard to define but is a classic you know it when you see it. Well that's fine but I can't afford to have someone comb through 600,000 apps and make a call for each one on whether it's a hobby or not. :-) > The result of a single Udemy course We don't know how people wrote their apps. Also, someone can do a single Udemy course and then develop a killer app that makes millions of dollars. Is that a hobby? > something that serves 0 to few users (most of whom are the devs friends) I assure you plenty of commercial projects fail in exactly this way. ~90% of startups fail. > something not actively being developed Plenty of commercial projects have no active development. Probably most, frankly. For example my bank's app hasn't changed in years. > something where the code base is quite small, etc. Is Wordle commercial or hobby? Would a Wordle-style app written in Flutter count as a hobby app or a commercial app? What if it sells for millions of dollars the day after we decide it's a hobby app? I just don't think this is a useful metric. > I think the wider question is how many people are getting enough value out of Flutter that it truly translates into value for Google that is worth sustaining, definitely not an easy question to answer. The value Google wants is ad dollars, Android users, and reduced internal development costs. Google isn't willing to report any of these numbers, and they are material so I would get in legal trouble for revealing them. My job is working on Flutter, and I am not concerned for my job. If that's not enough, there's not much more I can tell you. > I would have to dive into the current issues to get them all. I'm happy to discuss whatever issues you'd like if you're curious about current status on things. I recommend reaching out to me on our Discord (link in the contributing docs on GitHub, I'm @Hixie there). In general all our issues are public on GitHub and for Flutter I try to give regular updates on the top-voted issues (see also https://github.com/flutter/flutter/wiki/Popular-issues for a summary of the top 10). > But coming from other languages / frameworks there is an incompleteness that feels more important to address than games no matter what a survey says. I'm not sure what to say to that. Dart has one of the most comprehensive standard libraries out there. We have some holes, e.g. we don't yet have a good story for HTTP2, which we're working on. But compared to most languages, the core standard library is way more comprehensive than average, IMHO. But again, the people who would work on, say, HTTP2, and the people who would work on the Game Toolkit, are entirely different people and the skills aren't interchangeable. Engineers aren't commodities you can just move around at will. People specialize, have interests, commitments are made, etc. I would also say that "no matter what a survey says" is a very subjective way to run things. I actually strongly appreciate our data-driven approach. I think that's the right way to develop a product. You're never going to be able to address everyone's needs, but addressing the needs of the most people first seems like the better choice. We drive almost all our efforts from hard data collected in surveys, UX research, voting on issues, etc. > Saying they are orthogonal is denying resources/funds could be used differently for different goals. The paltry funds we spent on the Game Toolkit work literally could not have been used for iOS work. That's just not how things work. > growing Flutter user base has a priority over polish The two are not mutually exclusive. The Google team working on Flutter is currently focusing on growing the user base _by_ improving the polish (specifically around developer experience). > Thank you! This!! This gives some idea of how many devs are truly working on Flutter worldwide. These numbers make much more sense to me and what I see! These numbers have been public for some time, for what it's worth. We're pretty transparent, more or less as transparent as we can be about this stuff given constraints like privacy on analytics and given the very dubious nature of analytics in general. We tend to share these numbers on our blog and developer events regularly. > "It has a developer base of several million", I felt like this was gaslighting me as I could not see where all these devs existed The total Flutter developer base is much bigger than MAUs. As best we can tell from data collected by third parties, there are several million developers who use Flutter. They might not all do so within the same month, though. (For the same reason, if we had weekly active user numbers, they'd be smaller than the monthly active user numbers.) I would be very careful about interpreting absolute numbers here. You cannot compare numbers from different sources because collection methodology is such a huge factor in determining the result (literally by orders of magnitude). In my experience the only way to use metrics like this is comparing them over time to metrics collected in the exact same manner. > it does not go unnoticed where [Remy] works and I am guessing is sorta paid by proxy by Google. I actually have no idea where Remy works, where is it? > These feel tied together, I mean this in a honest way and not to offend the team, but does anyone on the team use iOS full time and run Flutter apps on device in prod regularly (just cruise ebay motors?)? Yes, of course. > I talk to other iOS users and this is a well known issue, scroll acceleration is off (scroll fast and it's WAY off), there is an issue already posted for Flutter with scroll being a full frame behind native so the location / perceptions feels off at first touch, and pull to refresh is a bit janky at times. Do you have the issue #? I can see if we should be prioritizing it higher. > "We actually have built tools to verify that we are matching iOS physics to the pixel" I mean no offense, but is something code wise wrong in the tooling? Maybe? I don't know. My experience on iOS is that we do pretty well, but maybe I'm just not sensitive to the same issues, or maybe it affects different hardware, or maybe we have changed the settings, who knows. Concrete data filed in actual GitHub issues is the way to resolve this. |
Very fair
> Well that's fine but I can't afford to have someone comb through 600,000 apps and make a call for each one on whether it's a hobby or not. :-)
> We don't know how people wrote their apps. Also, someone can do a single Udemy course and then develop a killer app that makes millions of dollars. Is that a hobby?
> I assure you plenty of commercial projects fail in exactly this way. ~90% of startups fail.
Here I what I was getting at was todo examples being submitted, or some single tutorial chat client, someone can come out and make flappy birds of course, I taught kids in the past and some went on to publish their apps as encouragement from their parent. Nothing wrong with it, just don't see it paying the bills was my point. That was the totality of my point I think....
> The value Google wants is ad dollars, Android users, and reduced internal development costs.
I was trying to get at if a billion "hobby" devs don't drive any of this it's all a zero, thus my interest in that number.
> My job is working on Flutter, and I am not concerned for my job. If that's not enough, there's not much more I can tell you.
This is the best answer yet
> But again, the people who would work on, say, HTTP2, and the people who would work on the Game Toolkit, are entirely different people and the skills aren't interchangeable. Engineers aren't commodities you can just move around at will. People specialize, have interests, commitments are made, etc.
Totally agree, it seemed more to me people were hired for this vs expanding elsewhere.
> The paltry funds we spent on the Game Toolkit work literally could not have been used for iOS work. That's just not how things work.
Seems like it didn't matter though so fair enough
> I would also say that "no matter what a survey says" is a very subjective way to run things.
> The two are not mutually exclusive. The Google team working on Flutter is currently focusing on growing the user base _by_ improving the polish (specifically around developer experience).
I could be 100% wrong but perception is real, after I wrote this I was sent links to other people on twitter lamenting the same growth into other sectors while mobile was not polished. I know in the yearly survey it asked about professional use, not sure if that gets more weight?
> These numbers have been public for some time, for what it's worth.
I tried googling this so many times, SEO of dev shops and blogs obscure whatever is out there on this subject.
> The total Flutter developer base is much bigger than MAUs
This is a deeper convo, if I have to update some wordpress php once every 6 months am I really part of the php/wordpress developer base? Idk, it's semantics I suppose, I have my opinion that the base is people who deal with the language / framework on a nearly weekly basis. My point in being interested in this number related to "Google wants is ad dollars", and the assumption they connect.
> I actually have no idea where Remy works, where is it?
Remmy works for Invertase who make all the Firebase packages, he and they do a great job imho.
The last pieces were on iOS, here is the issue that was filed: https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/110431 but honestly if you have full time iOS users ask them, they have to know, it's impossible to miss, this is not the only issue, but it requires more quantifying. To be totally frank as a dev with many iOS and Android test phones, Flutter scrolling feels like Android scrolling on an iPhone.