> I have no reason to believe that Flutter is particularly different from the others in terms of the proportion of apps of this kind
I was just trying to understand adoption rate which I believe correlates to longevity
> Again, the various areas aren't comparable or exchangeable.
> My house's kitchen isn't perfect, but I still want a bedroom.
I totally get this viewpoint, I think perception can be different from the outside.
> By that definition, I am not a programmer, because there's literally no language that I use every week.
Head back to IC ;)
> By the way, that issue was filed by a Flutter team member, so presumably that answers your question about whether the Flutter team notices iOS issues.
Need to take issue here, this was talked exhaustively about in a thread on reddit where a dev was leaving Flutter because of user complaints on this issue, the thread was seen by a team member then and taken up.
Every language has spots of pain, of course, but the sticky points in Dart at scale don't feel like rough edges, they significantly effect workflow.
> you seem to want to imply something but not come out and say it
I have said multiple times not eating the dog food makes me weary, Google uses Angular a lot, why not Flutter? ...I think you need to read back I am well aware of Pay, this thread is about Stadia, the largest commercial Flutter project at google afaik, being killed. Pay is USA and India only.
> Not sure why you keep focusing on iOS and Flutters focus on Material
> This is my biggest pet peeve, anecdotally I hear a fair bit of this coming from mobile devs
> Not a single non-dev person has ever mentioned it to me.
I think you may be too deep in the Android space, I have heard this a ton. TBH I think many times the apps are wrapped webviews so scrolling works but other interactions feel off, but 100% non devs notice when iOS apps don't feel native.
> I mean, I hate to be flippant about it, but honestly the biggest factors in Google's funding of Flutter in the last 5 years have been COVID-19 and Russia attacking Ukraine, along with the subsequent market instability and inflation.
Very fair
> Well that's fine but I can't afford to have someone comb through 600,000 apps and make a call for each one on whether it's a hobby or not. :-)
> We don't know how people wrote their apps. Also, someone can do a single Udemy course and then develop a killer app that makes millions of dollars. Is that a hobby?
> I assure you plenty of commercial projects fail in exactly this way. ~90% of startups fail.
Here I what I was getting at was todo examples being submitted, or some single tutorial chat client, someone can come out and make flappy birds of course, I taught kids in the past and some went on to publish their apps as encouragement from their parent. Nothing wrong with it, just don't see it paying the bills was my point. That was the totality of my point I think....
> The value Google wants is ad dollars, Android users, and reduced internal development costs.
I was trying to get at if a billion "hobby" devs don't drive any of this it's all a zero, thus my interest in that number.
> My job is working on Flutter, and I am not concerned for my job. If that's not enough, there's not much more I can tell you.
This is the best answer yet
> But again, the people who would work on, say, HTTP2, and the people who would work on the Game Toolkit, are entirely different people and the skills aren't interchangeable. Engineers aren't commodities you can just move around at will. People specialize, have interests, commitments are made, etc.
Totally agree, it seemed more to me people were hired for this vs expanding elsewhere.
> The paltry funds we spent on the Game Toolkit work literally could not have been used for iOS work. That's just not how things work.
Seems like it didn't matter though so fair enough
> I would also say that "no matter what a survey says" is a very subjective way to run things.
> The two are not mutually exclusive. The Google team working on Flutter is currently focusing on growing the user base _by_ improving the polish (specifically around developer experience).
I could be 100% wrong but perception is real, after I wrote this I was sent links to other people on twitter lamenting the same growth into other sectors while mobile was not polished. I know in the yearly survey it asked about professional use, not sure if that gets more weight?
> These numbers have been public for some time, for what it's worth.
I tried googling this so many times, SEO of dev shops and blogs obscure whatever is out there on this subject.
> The total Flutter developer base is much bigger than MAUs
This is a deeper convo, if I have to update some wordpress php once every 6 months am I really part of the php/wordpress developer base? Idk, it's semantics I suppose, I have my opinion that the base is people who deal with the language / framework on a nearly weekly basis. My point in being interested in this number related to "Google wants is ad dollars", and the assumption they connect.
> I actually have no idea where Remy works, where is it?
Remmy works for Invertase who make all the Firebase packages, he and they do a great job imho.
The last pieces were on iOS, here is the issue that was filed: https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/110431 but honestly if you have full time iOS users ask them, they have to know, it's impossible to miss, this is not the only issue, but it requires more quantifying. To be totally frank as a dev with many iOS and Android test phones, Flutter scrolling feels like Android scrolling on an iPhone.
Hey, want to start by saying I appreciate the full reply, this is much more reassuring. Obviously trust in Google is what it is...
On the budget / funding side I understand not all details can be shared, I think the general gist is just the broad question of what can effect flutter funding. It sounds like Stadia shut down won't, but I see that question was also raised on Reddit, so clarity on that was appreciated beyond myself I am sure, and any more would be appreciated as well.
On internal apps, I know Flutter is being used, this sort of leaks into PRs, comments, etc, but I think the question I was getting at is if that has enough value to google. On the outward facing apps this is definitely a matter of perception, I don't think I need to expand there.
The hobby projects, I think this is hard to define but is a classic you know it when you see it. The result of a single Udemy course, something that serves 0 to few users (most of whom are the devs friends), something not actively being developed, something where the code base is quite small, etc. Projects done and published for the sake of learning more than their use to others is likely where I would draw the line. I think there is another line at profitable / paid dev, but I would say the lesser line is appropriate. I think the wider question is how many people are getting enough value out of Flutter that it truly translates into value for Google that is worth sustaining, definitely not an easy question to answer.
> I'm not sure what you're suggesting here. Our work on iOS is entirely orthogonal to the work on the Casual Games Toolkit, it's not like the people who worked on one could work on the other.
This is still hard for me to swallow. Codegen for json deserialization, data types, general slowdown in the analysis server at scale, the list feels long, I would have to dive into the current issues to get them all. But coming from other languages / frameworks there is an incompleteness that feels more important to address than games no matter what a survey says. Saying they are orthogonal is denying resources/funds could be used differently for different goals. The Stadia link was simply it seems growing Flutter user base has a priority over polish, and with an internal app shutting down it seemed growth could itself grow in importance over polish.
> <50% are "hobby"
> 500,000 MAUs
Thank you! This!! This gives some idea of how many devs are truly working on Flutter worldwide. These numbers make much more sense to me and what I see!"It has a developer base of several million", I felt like this was gaslighting me as I could not see where all these devs existed, how were stackoverflow issues that seemed like they should be semi-common with 0 to 1 replies!? This did not jive with millions of dev, even a small percent working at enterprise scale, and did not fit with my experience working on other frameworks that claim similar scales.
> I would point to things like numbers of users or apps rather than vanity metrics like GitHub stars, but there we go.
> I would posit that it is because Google Trends data is a terrible way to measure popularity of an SDK.
> Flutter is big and growing, but there are plenty of much bigger SDKs, certainly. I don't think that's a big secret. :-)
Combine the use of these two stats being heavily pushed in blogs etc with the, "It has a developer base of several million", quote, mix in first hand observations that they feel off, and the feeling the team is hiding something starts to manifest. Especially when blog posts turn these stats into proof through twisting that Flutter is for lack of a better term, "the biggest". Thank you for noting these are vanity numbers, imho pushing them does a disservice. I will also submit that at 5 years old continuing to push the narrative that Flutter is "new" and the nearest competitor only has any gains do that that gap starts to get some side eyes.
> We are a long way past there being any single person who is keeping the project afloat.
Agreed, but still it feels like there are a few big hitters, it does not go unnoticed where he works and I am guessing is sorta paid by proxy by Google.
> I don't see why a dedicated team couldn't pick up Dart in the same way, if the interest was there.
Agreed on Dart, I think Flutter is another matter though.
> The biggest complaint we hear is definitely jank, FWIW. :-)
>If you have specific reproducible cases of this, please file bugs with test cases demonstrating it. The more concrete and specific you can be (e.g. high speed video showing the difference) the better.
These feel tied together, I mean this in a honest way and not to offend the team, but does anyone on the team use iOS full time and run Flutter apps on device in prod regularly (just cruise ebay motors?)? I talk to other iOS users and this is a well known issue, scroll acceleration is off (scroll fast and it's WAY off), there is an issue already posted for Flutter with scroll being a full frame behind native so the location / perceptions feels off at first touch, and pull to refresh is a bit janky at times. "We actually have built tools to verify that we are matching iOS physics to the pixel" I mean no offense, but is something code wise wrong in the tooling? As a full time iOS user it's VERY obvious, you feel it and see it, my friend literally deleted an app due to it after using it for seconds, it's not just a vague complaint, it's highly perceivable.
> We've made huge strides here in the past year, but yeah, we still have work to do.
TY
> As far as I can tell, we've been transparent, with most of the numbers you say you'd like us to share being numbers we have in fact shared already.
I have gotten more info from this post than anything else I have read on the state of Flutter, appreciate it.
I read the strategy & Roadmap in its entirety and to be honest it made me more concerned Flutter will be axed.
Strategy:
> We primarily build for external-to-Google users, but Google adoption of Flutter remains of great value to us, as it helps us “pay our bills”
So grow or die as Google adoption is heading in a negative direction now and you are racing to grow enough to offset no one new eating the dog food?
> our primary strategic objective is the growth of monthly active users
> On the other hand, even a mediocre SDK will have a healthy and flourishing ecosystem if it is used by the plurality of developers.
Don't create something people love and use internally then share it with the world with mostly permanent internal funding, but instead get enough external buy-in that Google keeps it alive via inertia? My questions above were very much about this, does Flutter have that inertia in hard numbers or are you racing a clock now that internal buy-in is seemingly diminishing? Based on this you must have a MAU target, how far off is it, could you share even a percentage? If you don't hit it will the project be axed right away or is there a runway?
> Other characteristics (runtime performance, memory usage, etc.) will earn the respect of a developer: important, for sure. But developer experience will earn love.
This is only true until they realize the devils bargain you are mentioning above, I was complaining about expansion via game dev over polishing iOS in my previous post, this seems to be the planned strategy, which is very disheartening.
> In 2022 we will make good on this promise, and further raise our quality on web and desktop. We believe Flutter's growth will increasingly come from web and desktop: ecosystems that each have many millions of developers.
> Yet the web developer market is huge (10m+) and Flutter offers something distinctive for this audience
In a world where polish is not priority I think Flutter best fits on desktop, kudos there...web for flutter is very niche as noted, I guess if expansion is all that's important that's cool, but I would take iOS polish over web any day, I just don't see business apps using Flutter for web, it really only makes sense to me for apps that would be looking toward canvas, etc. anyway.
Roadmap:
> We will update the Material library to support Material 3.
iOS once again super low priority :(
> We plan to continue to evolve the language at a deliberately slow but steady pace.
This is how churn will happen, you have buy in from many people and they are clamoring for improvements, custom linting, sick of codegen, better inference, faster analysis in large repos, etc., but this is lower priority than gaming and material design updates.
> In 2021 we resolved a number of issues around jank ... As a result, we have been rewriting our graphics backend. In 2022
Out of everything I read only this last piece on jank felt like something I need as a current Flutter developer on mobile; thank you.
I have felt for a while the developer experience was too focused on easy entry / getting started and not professional work, this seemingly is the goal. The r/FlutterDev thread on the stadia shutdown has lots of users saying "Flutter is not Stadia", but it sounds like it is. Flutter is not an OSS framework like React that is supported by Meta because they use it heavily, this is a product, you need customers, Flutter has targets that can be missed just like Stadia. This is extremely worrisome. The same MSFT employee who asked you about MAU mentioned the large DevRel spend on Flutter vs the zero spend on the main competitor. I thought at the time this was to push more people toward Android first multi-platform (I would say the competitor is iOS first), turns out that was a misread. This also explains why MAU numbers are not shared, that's not a nice metric of an OSS community like other OSS frameworks have, that is a business metric.
Unless there is more hard number / metric / goal transparency I don't think you can really say there is no reason to be worried.
My understanding is only Pay in the US and India are the Flutter version, Wallet is not using Flutter. This also had the Flutter boat shaking on reddit a bit back.
I use Flutter every day...your team needs to be more transparent. Tangible answers and numbers, "Happy developers are a prerequisite for a wide variety of other Google APIs and services", is great, but those services and APIs have a variety of other entry points not using Flutter, they don't depend on it.
How is Flutter funded? It was said a few years ago the budget came from internal projects like ads, fuchsia, pay, and stadia, does stadia being killed effect the Flutter budget? There was an implication at that time that if they all died or left Flutter then it would be killed via budget cuts, is that true? Why is Flutter not being adopted by Google for more outward facing apps? Is it seen internally as at risk of abandonment?
"600,000 apps in the Play Store alone", how many of these are commercial vs hobby projects, does Google really care about these if enterprise adoption is minimal? Delving into game dev when iOS is not polished seemed like a decision made because there was a need to show potential value via expansion upward in the org, I was concerned this was a hail mary when announced, and with Stadia now gone the timing seems more suspect.
"It has a developer base of several million", how many of these are again hobby users, how many use it weekly / monthly? Flutter has a large DevRel push, how many of these projects / users are students who just spin it up once and hit star on GH when asked and never touch it again? Your team was asked approximately this question by a MSFT employee looking at publishing info on cross platform framework adoption vs native and could not get a straight answer I was told.
Multiple Flutter related posts by agencies and evangelists point to a google trends page or GH stars saying Flutter is blowing up in popularity compared to other frameworks, but when you start looking at core packages searched for and starred for each framework the Flutter trend reverses, is this because the words Flutter and Dart are too common and in actuality the popularity is not what is being projected in trends? Is this because DevRels directly ask people to star the core project? I ask Flutter GDE's these questions and they come off like they can't be trusted to be honest on these topics for fear of losing status. I have also heard a certain outspoken Flutter GDE mention on stream other frameworks have much larger communities, how can this jive with these purported trends?
It seems as though the community size and growth of Flutter is projected to be greater than it is, that's subjectively how it feels as a dev as well I will note as someone who is using packages / repos, and that is worrisome. I worry that the first time we hear solid numbers will be in a blog post about the Flutter project ending with an explanation that low enterprise adoption and direct or indirect revenue could not support the scale of this ambitious a project. It would be great to hear some hard facts that give people confidence in adoption and that Flutter has long term backing higher in the company. If this is not the case, honesty would be nice as well.
@a14n seems to have tailed off on his work on Flutter quite a bit, which worries me if he is the core example of users who would pick this up in an OSS abandonment situation. Even now it feels as though if major OSS package maintainers like Remi Rousselet walked away the community would be hit hard. I can't imagine the project continuing without Google, especially with Dart needing the same treatment if Flutter was killed. Dart issues with notes saying the team lacks bandwidth exist now, I just can't see it working even with some other companies interested, Flutter/Dart need full enterprise backing at this stage.
"which is using the new engine on iOS" - An aside... I downloaded the app, it seems pretty smooth, not sure the FPS but I saw minimal jank which is great. BUT, it still has the biggest complaint I hear about Flutter apps on iOS, feel. On iOS is does not feel native, the scrolling and gestures feel off. This is part of what I was referring to regarding ignoring polish on iOS in favor of expansion earlier, iOS still feels second class on Flutter. I have watched a friend delete a flutter app from their phone right after installing with the reasoning "I hate when apps feel like that, it's so obnoxious", these people exist, they feel Flutter apps are second class, this sentiment will 100% drive away enterprise adoption imho. Even recently a user on the flutterdev subreddit said they were leaving Flutter behind just do to this persistent user feedback.
My final thought is the same as my first, be more transparent, show the community with tangible honest numbers and backing Flutter is not in jeopardy, otherwise the track record (and imho vague mushy pumped up stats) makes it appear it is.
I live in Denmark, and can say there are many ways people do it here. Most common (from what I have seen as an American here) is to own a small business and use it to shift around ownership of things such as apt's and cars as tax on business is very different than personal...Google Danish car tax for more info on why.
A wealth tax? A good at 5000 with VAT is 6000 to buy that at 40% tax you need to earn 8400. With this system (assuming VAT remains, which in will because of EU law) you need to earn 6180 to buy the product a 2220 difference...but a 240 bill shows up every year for you owning said product (assume jewelry for 0 depreciation) so after 10 years you are better off on the old system.
Honestly this will simply encourage people to find loop holes in the system to avoid property ownership. And it's really what the right in the US mean when they say class warfare, it's just another clever way to shift the tax burden on the wealthy more. If that is what is wanted just shift up the 0 tax income limit and raise the top tax, no need to fuck around trying to seem like the goal is anything different.
It looks like a ton of people have helped you but I still thought I would put in my 2 cents as I may be the person closest to where you are...I went to DK on a student visa, met a girl, finished school in the US(where I am from) and moved back with the need of a visa.
You will have 3 options I would say, one, get a job that pays you enough/is on the positive list(this is what I did), but you will pay out your ass in tax and not have the right to stay if you lose the job. Two, get enough points on the Danish immigration system to stay(unlikely I would guess, but I haven't looked in a little while). Three, what I would suggest, keep freelancing but pay tax in the US, spend 3/6 months in DK. You will spend less in plane tickets by a ton then the difference in tax.
I can't really push this tax bit enough, the difference in cost of living combined with the high tax will change your lifestyle most likely. Unless you find someone who will pay you 2X what you make now you will end up with less in the bank and not be entitled to a lot of what the Danish welfare system offers. Just a warning. All the best in CPH!
I get what you are saying, and you are correct in many respects. But when the barrier to entry gets that low it is because we have advanced further. So if anyone can whip up a website without know how then there will be very little in the way of profitable companies in that field, because why pay for something the next guy can cook up easily? Instead the startups in this theoretical time will be focused on creating companies that allow you to just whip up a drag and drop sites because they will be making the money, hell many companies do that now for small business that want to create splash pages, or restaurants with menus. What I am saying here is the Morse code guys weren't CS majors of today, the CS majors were EE's of that day figuring out long range radio while people started using the telephone. Money is in the next big thing not the last.
I am not trying to tell you to forget your plan, I just hope you are aware that you aren't living 15 years from now where the tides have potentially shifted. You will graduate in 1-3 years and be in the current work force that is flooded with liberal arts degrees, I have a ton of friends who have gone back to get a Masters to help differ getting a job further as their degrees did not put them in the position they were hoping. So if you would like to avoid this fate your best bet is either get in a technical/graphical program or get EXTREMELY involved starting now in the space you want to go into. Coming out of school with a BA and some interest in tech is not going to open a ton of doors, ever since the Facebook movie every person I know with no tech background has 100 ideas for apps I should build for them...and they have BA's too, they just need a "technical co-founder" and 75%.
I am really not trying to put you down, just trying to say if you want to be in a technical field you either need to be technical or work your ass off early, often, and many times for free.
"One of the reasons that I stand by my choice is because I believe a very similar to that of the MBA’s will befall the CS students. The job/major market will correct itself and return to more natural levels where there isn’t an insanely high demand for computer engineers."
Couldn't disagree more. Maybe CS will slow down, but engineers in general are what the world is short on because the education is multiples harder than others. Demand is there because engineers are what the world finds valuable. People, in this age, desire things. And simply put engineers make things. Not everyone is capable of making them, on the other hand most people who got an undergrad degree could easily get an MBA given the time and money. If I was you I wouldn't bet the house on the pendulum taking a swing, if you are just pumping out the undergrad to get easy A's for you MBA application you'd be better off dropping out and joining a start-up now if that is where your interest's lay. And perhaps more, if your interests honestly lay in technology and you are going to college, get a degree in it. Just don't want to be kicking yourself later.
It's great to see a high quality piece of hardware brought all the way to market by a startup. Within the realm of hackernews/ycomb there is a huge focus on software because of the relative cost of bringing it to market, it's understandable. But I would love to see some more stories on HN about some of the behemoth industrial plays that happen outside of the software world, this is a nice example of sorts although it is still a very software heavy company.
I drove down route 9 twice a day for about a year (in and out of Boston), this is NOT the norm. The one bridge they were working on then was about this size and at about twice the height. It had apparently been going on for 5+ years, Mass DOT is anything BUT efficient(See Big Dig) so I wouldn't really expect this as the new norm. Also then how would they manage to pay so many people to stand around all day not working??
I wrote to kickstarter this week to alert them of what was either a scam or an over confident 3d modeler. I and others on reddit pointed out a bunch of flaws in the cost of creating the product described at the given goal. It was a minimum of 3X off. Kickstarter wrote back to tell me in so many words that it is the users job to not be taken advantage of, all I could think is "yup you get your 10% no matter what so why care." Truely let down from a company I really liked.
Nice to see NEU on here, they are big Scheme fans there I know so I don't know how much Ruby it will relate to. Python is used in some classes as well I believe (I was an ME major with friends in CS).
Hacker is fine, all job descriptions looking for a "ninja hacker" or for that matter any job descriptions prefixed with the word ninja should be ignored. I have never met someone serious about programming that liked to be called a ninja or thought of themselves as such. I have met many people who were very into start-ups but had no CS or Engineering background that loved to give themselves and others silly prefixes though. In a nut shell call yourself what you like, but be wary of those too interested in titles as they are probably trying to make up for something.
I was just trying to understand adoption rate which I believe correlates to longevity
> Again, the various areas aren't comparable or exchangeable. > My house's kitchen isn't perfect, but I still want a bedroom.
I totally get this viewpoint, I think perception can be different from the outside.
> By that definition, I am not a programmer, because there's literally no language that I use every week.
Head back to IC ;)
> By the way, that issue was filed by a Flutter team member, so presumably that answers your question about whether the Flutter team notices iOS issues.
Need to take issue here, this was talked exhaustively about in a thread on reddit where a dev was leaving Flutter because of user complaints on this issue, the thread was seen by a team member then and taken up.