Live data from Hacker News

We're forking Flutter

flutterfoundation.dev

11–20 of 748 posts

Re: We're forking Flutter

#11
post #4

Very sad article to read. I just expect the original Flutter will now die a slow death. I applaud the effort and hope they will be able to find a monetization model that works to support the development. There have been similar projects based on technologies that Microsoft has killed (Silverlight -> OpenSilver and various .NET-based cross-platform technologies) that serve their customers well. Unfortunately, none of…

> There have been similar projects based on technologies that Microsoft has killed Isn't flutter from google?

Yes. But the other technologies mentioned were from Microsoft.

Re: We're forking Flutter

#12

> What do you do if the team won't work on that bug for 2 years? Well, if it's a serious bug for your company, then you stop using Flutter. You don't have a choice. You need to keep moving forward. Your team doesn't know how to work on the Flutter framework, and the Flutter framework team is either unresponsive, or at least completely non-committal towards a fix. Are there no escape hatches?

> Your team doesn't know how to work on the Flutter framework

The only escape hatch I can think of is to either have the team learn how to work on Flutter itself or hire someone who can.

Re: We're forking Flutter

#13
post #4

Very sad article to read. I just expect the original Flutter will now die a slow death. I applaud the effort and hope they will be able to find a monetization model that works to support the development. There have been similar projects based on technologies that Microsoft has killed (Silverlight -> OpenSilver and various .NET-based cross-platform technologies) that serve their customers well. Unfortunately, none of…

> There have been similar projects based on technologies that Microsoft has killed Isn't flutter from google?

Yes, it is. I was just thinking about what happened when other companies did something similar.

Re: We're forking Flutter

#14

They estimate there are one million Flutter developers/users. Have I been sleeping under a rock?

they're just too close to the problem and overestimating their relevance.

just because someone cloned a repo once or an NPM package was downloaded doesn't mean someone is a flutter dev. I don't know what the best metric would be, but its relevance is definitely overstated

Re: We're forking Flutter

#16
Honestly makes sense to me. If Google has proven one thing is that it generally maintains a very tight grip on anything open-source that they ship. Ie. it's extremely hard to contribute upstream. This is fine when it's a package that's critical to good, so they invest a lot into it (for example, Jax). But for stuff that's not quite there, it means fixes will meander for months if not years.

Re: We're forking Flutter

#17

They estimate there are one million Flutter developers/users. Have I been sleeping under a rock?

Assuming there are 20 million software engineers in the world writing code professionally, 1 million Flutter developers seems massively optimistic.

Re: We're forking Flutter

#18

They estimate there are one million Flutter developers/users. Have I been sleeping under a rock?

they're just too close to the problem and overestimating their relevance. just because someone cloned a repo once or an NPM package was downloaded doesn't mean someone is a flutter dev. I don't know what the best metric would be, but its relevance is definitely overstated

Yeah, people like to count their "downloads" and call that their "users", but it's at least an order of magnitude difference in my experience. Sometimes a 100x difference.

Re: We're forking Flutter

#19
post #8

Flutter is truly a piece of great tech with remarkable quality and value. I hope the right path will be found. I think companies using it for commercial purposes (like what we're doing) should contribute something to the effort to help make sure Flutter not only survives, but flourishes. Bug bounties, supporting individual developers, supporting efforts and initiatives, professional services, or any other way that he…

> Flutter is truly a piece of great tech with remarkable quality and value.

How does it compare to React Native from user and developer experience perspectives? Are there other competitors?

Re: We're forking Flutter

#20
As someone reliant on Flutter, it is likely better to rip off the band-aid now than wait for a slow, prolonged decline. That being said, whilst I am at least somewhat comforted that the person taking charge is someone who was involved with the Flutter team at Google in the past, rather than a random, overenthusiastic person, I have a few crucial criticisms on this post that make me skeptical.

For one, I'd recommend adding a newsletter field to the website/blog, simply so those who may not want to test or participate right away can stay in the loop. More importantly though, the two links asking for reviewers and leads just link to a private Eggs account, which, even before someone decided it was a good idea to just make content appear in an unsorted manner (random post from 2023, then 2021, then 2024, then 2020, ...), has never been an ideal approach for such projects in my opinion. I honestly thought I had clicked on the wrong links when two eggs profiles appeared in new tabs.

Forcing potential devs to create a third-party account on a social media site, then send in DMs is likely not the best way to get such a major project of the ground and having public repos or at least a contact form set up would go a long way, especially since that also makes it easier to enforce some ruleset for applications.

Additionally, consider listing what changes have been implemented in Flock at this stage. As it stands, it appears impossible to easily tell what one can expect without diving into the changes [0] one-by-one.

Still, wishing you the best as Flutters development and approach to both what goes into which branch, as well as keeping up-to-date with UI elements in target OSs has been leaving a lot to be desired to say the least. I still feel that, despite all shortcomings, for certain applications and workflows, Flutter/Dart remains the best, and it would be a shame to see it unmaintained.

[0] https://github.com/flutter/flutter/compare/master...Flutter-...

Post reply on HN