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We're forking Flutter

flutterfoundation.dev

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Re: We're forking Flutter

#521

Post by wink »

kyriakos wrote: post #449
1st1 wrote: post #348

> How large is the Flutter team, today? Google doesn't publish this information, but my guess is that the team is about 50 people strong. > 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. This is a we…

PHP Foundation has 10 developers and runs a substantial part of the web. 50 developers are definitely the wrong reason to fork flutter.

Not sure this is a good comparison because the PHP Foundation is "relatively" new and afaik there's no strong correlation to "the php development team" besides these people being paid and also work on it. PHP had a 20y history before this foundation, and the main difference is that it was never steered directly by one big company. Zend, yeah, but they had influence, they had neither started the project, nor ever had a long-stretching majority of people in the important positions. (Disclaimer: have not been an active part of the project for a couple years)

Re: We're forking Flutter

#522

Post by openplatypus »

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…

Wait, did you just publicly admit to Google collecting terminal device information without user consent?

Re: We're forking Flutter

#523

Post by divan »

Eisenstein wrote: post #484
divan wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What kind of users/apps are these? I'm genuinely curious about this, actually. I have a couple of apps with 100K+ installs, and I talk to people who are actual users from time to time. I have never ever heard the claim that they don't like UI because it doesn't feel native. Like ever. But I can imagine that in some niches/demographics/app types it might be different. Can you share some evidence or explain how you bui…

A lot of people try an app and stop using it. Talking to active users seems you are missing the people who don't like it enough to stop using it.

I think it may be true only for the apps that are easily replaceable.

Re: We're forking Flutter

#525

Post by divan »

wruza wrote: post #393
nox101 wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

flutter's custom canvas render on web means so much of the web stops working or is slow. type anything non ASCII like an emoji or CKJ and eat while it downloads a font. No other pages do this. Text fields are missing all the standard context menu options like define, translate, etc... Things that would be selectable on any other page are not, etc....

This. They can have all the deviations they want, but “input core” must be native. If a framework ignores it, users will notice and frown upon it immediately. When flutter came out publicly, first I thought no way it can get away with custom everything. But it turned out some developers don’t care about that at all.

I disagree with this so much for two reasons:

1. I shipped more than five Flutter web apps with actual users for a couple of years, and it's been a great experience so far.

2. "Native" web core should burn in hell, and I hope Wasm will finally contribute to it. Amount of developers who do not realize that "native web" is a typesetting engine from 80s with a pile of hacks on top of it, is too large to fight the opinion, of course. And yet, as a developer, I care about using the right tool for the right task, and no amount of browser engine optimization can change the fact that XML-based markup language is not the right tool for modern performant cross-platforms UIs.

Re: We're forking Flutter

#526

Post by robertlagrant »

emptysongglass wrote: post #479
kllrnohj wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very rarely do the people working full time on a framework/tool also use that framework/tool in a non-toy setting. They aren't working two full time jobs after all.

Always, always, dogfood what you produce. The number one way devs cease making products people care to use is by not using what they make.

I'm a man who once made medical software for pregnant women. There's no point being dogmatic.

Re: We're forking Flutter

#527

Post by divan »

chipdart wrote: post #465
divan wrote: post #120

> 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 replac…

> 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. Electron-based apps are also everywhere and they are through and through bad and a step backward. I would take caution to not do appeals to authority. I would extend this assertion over any javascript-on-a-webview-based GUI framework.…

You are right, sheer popularity is not the argument for the quality of the framework. I wrote those two sentences separately for different purposes (the second was more of a reflection of other comments in the thread. I should've put it in a separate paragraph or elaborated more.

Re: We're forking Flutter

#528

Post by Ragnarork »

emptysongglass wrote: post #479
kllrnohj wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very rarely do the people working full time on a framework/tool also use that framework/tool in a non-toy setting. They aren't working two full time jobs after all.

Always, always, dogfood what you produce. The number one way devs cease making products people care to use is by not using what they make.

I'm sure all those devs working on fighter jet's software would love to but alas...

Re: We're forking Flutter

#529

Post by robertlagrant »

basilgohar wrote: post #411
milch wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd also like to meet all these mythical users that have devices from every platform and want all their apps to look the same across all platforms. 99% of people I know IRL are in one ecosystem, with the exception of some that have an iPhone/iPad + Windows PC

It's not the end users that care about the uniformity but the fact the corporate design team wants there to be uniformity across all their platforms they support. This is part of branding and user experience. I'm not arguing for or against, just stating that is where the push for this comes from. It would make support, for example, easier, if all versions of your app user experience were similar.

I'm not quite sure why this was downvoted. It's true.

Re: We're forking Flutter

#530

Post by divan »

jwells89 wrote: post #314
divan wrote: post #120

> 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 replac…

I can’t imagine using Flutter for desktop development if only because like most newer UI frameworks, it’s mobile focused and doesn’t come with important desktop widgets like tableviews/datagrids and treeviews.

There are plenty, though, and they work amazingly well on desktop: https://pub.dev/packages/syncfusion_flutter_datagrid
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