HN Explorer

Ask HN: Will Google Abandon Dart/Flutter?

37 points by ram4jesus ↗ HN
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.

33 comments

[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 84.9 ms ] thread
PaulHoule
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.
theanonymousone
But GWT isn't particularly alive either :(

I say because I really like(d) it. No idea on or experience with Flutter.

Apocryphon
Wasn't GWT supported for like a decade? I don't think it was axed into the Google Graveyard so much as it just aged out.
treis
Which makes it useless the minute any of the compilation targets introduce a breaking change or significant additional UI functionality.
aintmeit
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.

michaelcao
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.
tempxyz
"Don't put all your eggs in one basket."
aintmeit
Too late. You already put all your existing eggs, as well as future eggs that you've promised to others, in this basket. You're net negative eggs now, brother.
ram4jesus
egg spiral stagflation
aintmeit
You ever wonder if some people think they have a way with words; instead, these same people are nearly illiterate?
solardev
Remember, Google doesn't care about you.
aintmeit
Let them learn the hard way. I mean the really, really hard way.
ram4jesus
100%. My first realization was when Wave was cancelled. Then I slowly came around and they proved me wrong with Google+. With Stadia it's so obvious that Google has contempt for its users; it's the equivalent of the bully tactic 'why are you hitting yourself?'.
aintmeit
Yes, but why are you hitting yourself?
ram4jesus
Hahaha. I'm a sucker for pain I guess.
aintmeit
See you at the bottom of the lake, then.
mandrizzle
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

GoldenMonkey
Just knowing how software development works… this will never happen. Few dev shops have the resources, time or inclination to migrate code bases… and for what end game?

I guess Google can dream. But, while where dreaming in hypotheticals…

By that time, apple will have their own search engine along with all of Google’s iOS mobile ad revenue. And today, iOS accounts for 80% of Google’s mobile ad revenue.

And while this migration is happening… Apple’s AR and VR devices will be competing with meta’s… Google won’t even have a device… they’ll be disinter-mediated. And in serious financial decline. As ad revenue evaporates for them.

realusername
> Few dev shops have the resources, time or inclination to migrate code bases… and for what end game?

They don't need to convince people to migrate, they just need to make Flutter the most attractive option when starting a new app. At some point it will start to eat their lunch.

The Apple dev story isn't without its own issues either, think about the cahotic migration to swift or the rapidly changing ui frameworks

6510
5. And then they shut it down
dtagames
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.

eternityforest
Aside from flutter, what open source, truly cross platform dev tools do we have with that level of performance, that are fully supported and not some obscure github page, that integrate with debugging and simulation in the IDE that well? With hot reloads?

Plus, it's a a safe-ish language, it's a pretty nice declarativeish GUI system that is nearly free of manual fussing with positions and sizes, it's got utility functions in the standard library....

It gets basically everything right.

There's lots of ways to make web UIs, but how many can be used on Android all that well?

Flutter pretty much puts the entire dev experience in a box almost like VB did, just 100x better and without the focus on RAD builders.

It's not 500 tools never meant to integrate and linters that can't find your dependencies, everything works together.

If flutter went, I'd be sad. I have never seen anything like it, anywhere.

dtagames
For me, the answer is bare metal web components with Lit. It's all web standards stuff and not going to change underneath you. With a hot reload server like Vite and writing TS in VSCode, you have amazing developer support. Even Copilot understands web components because they're HTML. I'm faster and write better code with this setup than any UI "framework" that's tied to a vendor.

Personally, I'm over proprietary platforms for mobile and desktop devices. It's much easier from a dev standpoint to deliver everything as a web app.

PS: Here's an intro series [0] I wrote on bare metal web components.

[0] https://medium.com/gitconnected/getting-started-with-web-com...

jmartin2683
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.
borplk
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.

Lionga
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).