Ask HN: Will Google Abandon Dart/Flutter?
I'm dismayed with Stadia shutdown even if the writing was on the wall and it was obvious to a lot of people.
Will Google ever abandon Dart/Flutter? Say I could land a job on the Dart/Flutter team, would that be a career deadend?
I'm a huge fan of Dart/Flutter but I'm hesitant to continue to use it if that's the endgame.
Don't think so they are heavily invested in it. As Flutter PM wrote here on HN:
The reason you should feel confident to use Flutter is because it's strongly in our business interest to invest in it. Over 600,000 apps in the Play Store alone are already written using Flutter, to say nothing of the countless apps for iOS, Windows, macOS, Linux and web. The list includes big brands like Alibaba, BMW, eBay, and SHEIN. Neither Google as a whole, nor Android in particular would be better off if Flutter didn't continue to flourish.
Aside from that, there are thousands of engineers at Google who use Dart and Flutter internally to build a wide variety of apps. There are many millions of lines of code written that power everything from Ads to our internal CRM system. Google wouldn't be better off if we had to throw all that code away and start over.
Lastly, Flutter is very successful. It has a developer base of several million, is growing quickly, and developers tell us it makes them more productive (https://medium.com/flutter/does-flutter-boost-developer-prod...). Happy developers are a prerequisite for a wide variety of other Google APIs and services, so we have a vested interest in continuing that.
Even if it weren't for Google, there are more contributors to Flutter from outside Google than there are Flutter team employees. Those contributors include big companies like Samsung, Canonical and Sony, as well as prolific individual developers like @a14n (https://github.com/a14n).
Flutter is Googles Trojan Horse to invade Apples app ecosystem. No way they are going to abandon it.
Googles plan:
1. Release Flutter 2. Transition Android to FuchsiaOS 3. App developers migrate Android code base to Flutter 4. Businesses abandon Apples iOS tool chain for Flutter
The key being Flutter is the new “native” standard for Fuchsia
Recent statement on HN about Flutter, with discussion:
The writing on the wall for Flutter is the lack of uptake. We are in living in a world of too many ways to make web UIs. Google is hoping to control more of the framework ecosystem by getting everyone on a web UI system that they control. But it's too late for that.
Everyone who writes frontend stuff is sick of new framework and language proposals. I think many of us would rather figure out ways to become more productive and write better UIs in shorter time with the languages and tools we already have. There's just too much of a huge codebase in JS/TS and HTML to ever move any significant amount of anything to Dart and Flutter. There's no upside for the programmers who have to do that work.
Remember, Google doesn't care about you.
You should diversify. Currently, our company 2HAC Studio have been using some programming languages such as App script for Google Workspace addon, Swift for IOS app, reactJS for Shopify apps, Kotlin for Android apps. We diversify both the programming languages and app marketplaces so we could mitigate risk.
I wouldn’t invest significant time or energy into anything that is primarily driven or funded by Google until it’s very established and somehow making them a boatload of money.
It's not a cloud service, it won't go away if Google quits developing it. Of course it won't get updated, bug fixed, etc.
Nah, continue to put all your eggs in one basket. Remember to count your chickens before they hatch. Always go for two birds in the bush instead of the one in the hand.
Hey, you know that while the Titanic was sinking, plenty of passengers refused to believe anything except that the boat was indestructible. I mean, live and let live. Or maybe, live and let die.
I have this strange gut feel that the only reason Google hasn't killed it yet is because they like to "keep" the brilliant people working on it!
It seems to be in a bubble and nobody talks about it.
Almost like Google is just happy to fund the nerd project to keep the nerds busy.
I mean, eventually.
I predict it will be gone by 2025