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We're forking Flutter

flutterfoundation.dev

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Re: We're forking Flutter

#21

Post by plorkyeran »

> That's 50 people serving the needs of 1,000,000. Doing a little bit of division, that means that every single member of the Flutter team is responsible for the needs of 20,000 Flutter developers! That ratio is clearly unworkable for any semblance of customer support.

If "only" 50 people working on a project used by one million people was unworkably low then every single successful project out there would be doomed. I've certainly worked on things with much worse ratios than that.

> one has to critically assess why a team that loves external contributions has only managed to merge contributions from 1,500 developers over a span of nearly a decade.

External contributions from 1500 developers over a decade is a lot. That is an unusually high number, not a low one, and backs up Flutter's claim to love external contributions.

The fact that this person thinks that they can just magically conjure up dozens of volunteer PR reviewers is wild. Everything about this post makes it pretty clear that they don't have the slightest clue of the scope of what they're trying to do. This feels like one of the standard examples of an ex-bigco person setting off on their own with no understanding how just how much the bigco did in the background to facilitate their job.

Re: We're forking Flutter

#22

Post by e63f67dd-065b »

rubiquity wrote: post #7

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

There's 200k weekly downloads of node on npm. A million flutter devs means that there's a comparable amount of node devs to flutter. I'm not sure how else to estimate it, but there's 170k github stars of flutter compared to 100k node, and a roughly equal amount of forks.

The 2024 SO dev survey https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2024/technology/ has flutter at 10% and nodejs at 40%. Github language stats has JS about 10-15x the popularity of dart, but seeing as JS is more than just node it might pan out. https://madnight.github.io/githut/#/pull_requests/2024/1

So I guess looking at the stats 1M flutter devs is not an implausible number on its face.

Re: We're forking Flutter

#23

Post by punduk »

The main problem in projects like flutter is to always focus on the "new". If you focus on the new without stabilizing the existing basic features, you will accumulate thousands of problems. If the same path is followed in this new project, I think the result will be the same. There is still no clear update on issues opened years ago. and most are pretty basic needs.

Re: We're forking Flutter

#24

Post by eseidel »

rubiquity wrote: post #7

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

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 shock me that Flutter could be over 1M monthly (and probably several million annually).

There are just a lot of apps and app devs out there.

Re: We're forking Flutter

#25

Post by markus_zhang »

I must be living under the rock. I thought Flutter is prosperous? I only dabbed into Android development as a learning experience so I probably missed something important.

If everything the article says is true, should I switch to Kotlin?

Re: We're forking Flutter

#26

Post by sgt »

Key statement: "As Flock ships important bug fixes and features, the Flutter team can then choose to add those to Flutter, on their schedule. "

I see a lot of negative comments but I think this will be a net positive over time to the Flutter community and to the technology itself. I think it will also give Google a reality check on the needs of the community.

Re: We're forking Flutter

#27

Post by punduk »

eseidel wrote: post #24
rubiquity wrote: post #7

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

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…

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

Re: We're forking Flutter

#28

Post by markus_zhang »

rubiquity wrote: post #7

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

It's possible that they also count students and amateurs such as me, who only used it in a small project never published. There could be a million I guess, but professional developers are probably a lot less.

Re: We're forking Flutter

#29

Post by hobs »

riku_iki wrote: post #6

> 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. they could pay contributor or issue bug bounty..

Based on the article's premise getting that merged is the problem, not fixing code.

Re: We're forking Flutter

#30

Post by maxrmk »

> That's 50 people serving the needs of 1,000,000. Doing a little bit of division, that means that every single member of the Flutter team is responsible for the needs of 20,000 Flutter developers! That ratio is clearly unworkable for any semblance of customer support.

Back when I worked on .net we had fewer than 50 people maintaining a product that shipped to over a billion machines. If you opened an issue on github we'd usually reply that day.

It's getting a bit long in the tooth, but I feel like 'the mythical man month' should still be required reading for software devs. More devs != better.

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