Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

We're forking Flutter

flutterfoundation.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 748 posts

Re: We're forking Flutter

#111

Post by manmal »

pzo wrote: post #41
punduk wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are there any statistics on how much of it is used in production?

If there would be 1M flutter devs per year and on average team had 10 devs (rather rare most mobile teams would be smaller except really big apps) and development of app would take ~1 year you would expect minimum 100k new flutter apps in app store every year. That seems highly unlikely.

I‘ve worked for over a year, almost full time, on an internal Flutter app that never saw the light of day (maybe later, if the stars align). Many apps just get their support section revamped with Flutter because there’s no need for that to look fancy; but they‘ll still count against that quota. Many devs prototype their side projects with Flutter, but never release them. Etc

Re: We're forking Flutter

#112

Post by adamc »

muglug wrote: post #17
rubiquity wrote: post #7

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.

Just looked via google, and while no one really knows, common estimates of the number of web developers seem higher than that, on the order of 27 million.

Your point may still be valid, but... is 3-5% really that high?

(No dog in this, I'm not doing web development at the moment, although I have and probably will again.)

Re: We're forking Flutter

#113

Post by refulgentis »

999900000999 wrote: post #73
eseidel wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Flutter founder here. When I led the Google team we had pretty good analytics. `flutter` was for a long time opt-out with analytics and would phone home to Google and report usage. We filtered out docker containers and things that looked like CI and saw usage near 1M monthly actives when I left Google a couple years ago. I'm sure it's up since then. There are 10s of millions of web developers in the world. Doesn't sh…

Thank you for creating my favorite app framework. That said, I literally only use Flutter as a hobbyist. I made a basic web game for a friend, and a small web app that helps me manage my music lyric videos. I ultimately picked Flutter because I find it easier than actually building websites. Dart is amazing. But I'm not deploying to millions of users. At most 10 people have seen my Flutter apps. It's VERY good for cr…

on behalf of one of the Flutter founders, thank you for the thank yous.

I bet they'd mean a bit more if it wasn't coupled to a lengthy thinking-out-loud post that casts doubt on it, based on how many job listings you see, for something you don't look for job listings for.

Quick Google shows Dart 10th, right below SQL, right above Kotlin. https://www.devjobsscanner.com/blog/top-8-most-demanded-prog...

Re: We're forking Flutter

#115

Post by siamese_puff »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #106
steve_adams_86 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WhatsApp has a very narrow use case and feature set to support. Flutter is a multi-platform framework for developing apps like WhatsApp. It seems like a apples and oranges here.

I'm comparing the impact. Small tens of developers, affecting millions of people.

Sure and 1 guy built flappy birds played by tens of millions. The complexity is a completely different ball game IMO.

Re: We're forking Flutter

#116

Post by coffeeaddict1 »

> What do you do if the team won't work on that bug for 2 years?

This is reminiscent of how the Qt Company operates. Qt is super buggy and their bug tracker is full of unresolved bugs from years ago. However, the difference is that if you're a premium user you can pay for premium support to get someone to fix your bug.

Re: We're forking Flutter

#117

Post by odo1242 »

skybrian wrote: post #82

Back when I worked on GWT, we had trouble accepting outside contributions because the team had a mandate to support Googlers. That is, much like other libraries and tools at Google, changes could not break google3. This means testing patches against google3 and either changing the patch, or fixing whatever code used it, and these are tasks that no outsider can do. Shepherding these patches is no fun when you have you…

What is google3?

Re: We're forking Flutter

#118

Post by refulgentis »

xster wrote: post #84
eseidel wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://flutter.dev/showcase has a few examples. Flutter is everywhere at this point. TikTok in China (Douyin), PUBG Mobile, MGM Resorts, eBay Motors, Kijiji.com, Grab are a few off the top of my head. And of course a whole bunch of Google apps (GPay, Earth, Classroom, etc.), Toyota cars, LG TVs, Google's own hardware devices, etc. Tonal is probably the app I used most often that's Flutter. Caribou Coffee, Betterment…

small nit: many daily driver apps in China are partially Flutter. But TikTok is not at the present

small nit: douyin is. is it possible you read "TikTok in China (Douyin)" as "TikTok in America"?

Re: We're forking Flutter

#119

Post by 1propionyl »

I really hate to be the big downer here but given Google's corporate culture is any of this really a surprise?

Google and failure to support are at this point on par with peanut butter and jelly.

I wouldn't ever trust anything Google cosigns as likely to have much longevity. At this point I just assume we all know better.

Re: We're forking Flutter

#120

Post by divan »

> We describe Flock as "Flutter+". In other words, we do not want, or intend, to fork the Flutter community. Flock will remain constantly up to date with Flutter.

That was the first fear when I saw the title - splitting community and having two incompatible versions. Good to see it addressed in the post.

The second was just a fear of how it would complicate the development process, but it seems to be a drop-in replacement (just configuring FVM - Flutter Version Manager):

   Configure .fvmrc to use Flock:
   {
     "flutter": "master",
     "flutterUrl": "https://github.com/Flutter-Foundation/flutter.git"
   }
Flutter is the best thing that happened to UI development since Qt. Most people don't realize how many apps written in Flutter they use daily, simply because it's impossible to tell. And the frustration described in the post is felt by many CTOs and developers. Especially those who use Flutter for desktop and web. Flutter provides an amazing experience for desktop apps, and precisely because of that, it feels so frustrating when you stumble upon some stupid bug that has been open for a year or two and never gets prioritized. Usually, it's nothing critical, but still requires workarounds and wasting time.

I don't know, the idea of Flock sounds good, the main question is engaging the community. Hopefully, the author (who seem to be an ex-Flutter team member himself) have a good grasp on the state of the community.

Wishing luck to the project and going to keep an eye on the progress.

Post reply on HN