[preommr]

Flutter is going to be 5 years old soon. It's not even the leading solution for cross-platform development for mobile let alone desktop. It's great to be positive and supportive but realistically, if someone had to bet months of dev work on building something non-trivial - would they really choose flutter?

[atentaten]

I'm betting the farm on Flutter. I'm building a relatively complicated app that's integrated with native C code on iOS and Android. Before I decided to go with Flutter/Dart, paradigms that I knew nothing about, I experimented with all of the major frameworks. React Native, Expo, Ionic, Capacitor, etc. I chose Flutter because it had the best performance for what I was doing around high-performance audio. Flutter is allowing me to continuously move forward and make real progress as a solo dev. I'm finding the DX better than React Native. I'm going to need to make a related tvOS app as well, but not sure how well Flutter can support it.

[mhoad]

It’s hardly some toy SDK that is only suitable for MVPs. Google’s single biggest money maker Ads is built with it. It’s hardly a Google specific thing either there are a number of mega sized players also strongly betting on it for some fairly mission critical stuff if I understood correctly.

[satvikpendem]

Google AdWords is made with Dart, specifically AngularDart, not Flutter.

Edit: yes, Google Ads the mobile app is made with Flutter.

[mhoad]

Sorry I was referring to the mobile apps not the web experience.

[satvikpendem]

Where does it show that the mobile app is in Flutter?

[mhoad]

Under the settings screen there is a software licenses section. In there.

[satvikpendem]

Neat, it says Powered by Flutter on Android. That's pretty cool.

[scarface74]

You realize that even Google doesn’t use Flutter in their cross platform consumer apps.

https://9to5google.com/2021/10/10/google-ios-apps-native/

And just because “mega sized players” are betting on it has never stopped Google from abandoning projects before.

[capableweb]

> Google’s single biggest money maker Ads is built with it

You mean Google Adwords right, the admin panel? I can't see any evidence of that, nor is it listed at https://flutter.dev/showcase, where you get this from?

[malkia]

Google Ads is written in Flutter - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and... - if you go download, skip the welcoming bits, and go to licensing you'll see lots of flutter libraries including flutter itself

[capableweb]

Right, when people say "Google’s single biggest money maker" they're talking about Adwords, which is usually accessed via the web, not a Android app called "Google Ads".

[satvikpendem]

To be fair, it's all the same thing underneath, the Ads app is the same as AdWords on web. "Google's biggest money maker" isn't referring to either AdWords the website or the Ads mobile app, it's talking about the underlying ads product itself, ie what gets shown on websites, these are simply UIs over that.

[capableweb]

> the Ads app is the same as AdWords on web

Clearly not, the AdWords on the web is rendered using the DOM, while a Flutter application will be rendered via a canvas DOM element.

You can try this yourself by opening up the inspector.

Where the ads are mostly shown, is also built using normal (in the web sense) DOM elements, either images or text, rather than Flutter canvas elements.

[wiseowise]

> Google’s single biggest money maker Ads is built with it.

If Flutter disappeared tomorrow nobody would even notice it. How much functionality do you think is there?

[kjksf]

In March 2021 there were 150 thousand Flutter apps in Google Play store.

In May 2022 - 500 thousand.

See: https://www.nomtek.com/blog/flutter-app-examples

Today: I'm too lazy but you can google for more up-to-date stats.

"nobody" is gigantically wrong.

Flutter is extremely popular in mobile.

Web and desktop support is behind but it'll improve and popularity of Flutter on desktop and web will grow too.

[wiseowise]

I meant in Google Ads. How much is the front end there anyway?

[gfarah]

Our team choose flutter 3 years ago, we currently serve 2 million users. I attribute a big part of our success to Flutter and the flexibility it gave us as a growing startup.

[mixmastamyk]

Wait till you hear about Kivy. It's a hard, decade+ long slog to get this right.

[maxlamb]

To be fair, Flutter is now a close second to React Native, which is 7 years old.