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

51–60 of 748 posts

Re: We're forking Flutter

#51

Post by eseidel »

Topfi wrote: post #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 a…

Flutter Founder here. If you ever have any concerns re: Flutter, please don't ever hesitate to reach out. eric@shorebird.dev

Re: We're forking Flutter

#52

Post by Vt71fcAqt7 »

>But, sadly, trying to work with the Flutter team delivers a different reality. While some developers have had success working with the Flutter team, many other developers have found it frustrating, if not unworkable.

I'd love to see some examples. I've had my pull request merged in a fairly quick amount of time - less than one release cycle, which is what matters here.

Also frankly, nobody forking Flutter will be nearly skilled enough to work on the Flutter engine (Impeller). So it's hard to take this announcement seriously.

Re: We're forking Flutter

#53

Post by johnnyanmac »

plorkyeran wrote: post #21

> 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.…

these are also 50 google devs (that may or may not be at the company anymore) by this estimate. They could have just said there were critical tickets not addressed by Gooogle and their PR's ignored, and would have gotten a much more sympathetic response.

Re: We're forking Flutter

#54

Post by bsimpson »

sgt wrote: post #26

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.

> needs of the community

The constant question of big tech OSS is who is it for/why does it exist? Did they make this because they think it's a useful tool internally, or are they trying to build a platform for external developers? If they built it because it's internally useful, then it's probably open-sourced for cultural reasons (the people working on it are used to being in open source communities and want to share what they're working on).

Unless something is specifically being made as a platform for external developers (Android and Firebase come to mind), the level of support you'll get is at the whims of the team's current product leadership and budget. Both of those things change over time - a product manager can always say "let's focus on internal developers" and put the external community in maintenance mode. Based on the article's mention of desktop support being deprioritized, this might have happened on Flutter.

Big tech funds things that would be really hard to pull off with just volunteers, but big tech projects can also be victims to the capriciousness of corporate politics and budgeting.

Re: We're forking Flutter

#59

Post by flawn »

punduk wrote: post #27
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…

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

If you have an Android phone, get FlutterShark and check which of your installed apps use Flutter. It's a surprising amount actually. For example, I just recently discovered that Supercell uses Flutter for their Supercell-ID flow.

Re: We're forking Flutter

#60

Post by monocasa »

notpushkin wrote: post #37
e63f67dd-065b wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-…

> There's 200k weekly downloads of node on npm. I’m pretty sure Node developers usually don’t install Node from npm.

Does nvm not use npm internally?
Post reply on HN