> 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.
>Codegen for json deserialization, data types, general slowdown in the analysis server at scale, the list feels long,
Those are clearly Dart critiques, sure Dart is not a perfect language, but I can tell you coming from Java and Kotlin that they have plenty of warts of their own, as does ObjC and Swift. On the other hand, Dart is still being very actively developed and improved so I have no doubt that in the future, it will be better than today, just as its sound null-safety now out classes Kotlin's NS implementation.
>but does anyone on the team use iOS full time
Not sure why you keep focusing on iOS and Flutters focus on Material. Sure you might feel the need to use iOS styled widgets but there are plenty of commercial apps built with Flutter that very happily base off of Material and you should note that the new rendering engine has been developed on iOS first to specifically address many of the valid perf issues that skia based engine has had on iOS and Metal.
>. On the outward facing apps this is definitely a matter of perception, I don't think I need to expand there.
After reading all your preceding posts and now this, you seem to want to imply something but not come out and say it. I know that Google have publicly announced Flutters use by Google Pay (https://flutter.dev/showcase/google-pay), if that's not a big enough app for you I'm not sure what would convince you.
>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.
This is my biggest pet peeve, anecdotally I hear a fair bit of this coming from mobile devs, especially with iOS devs who seem fixate on this, but guess who I've never heard this from in over decade in mobile dev: iOS users (and Android users) who are not devs. Literally never. Not a single non-dev person has ever mentioned it to me. Sure the complain about a million others things to do with phones, apps, you name it, it's amazing all the things people want to talk to you about when they find out you're a mobile app dev, but literally it's never about scroll physics being too fast or off.
Sure I'm very involved in the Flutter community and do it for my day job, so I can quite rightly be labelled as biased, but trying to be as objective as possible, on all measures I can think of, Flutter is a very successful open source project and simultaneously a very successful "commercial product" which is quite a rare feat to this day.
Finally on the topic of open source, I'd point out that unlike for instance AOSP (another huge Google project/product) Flutter is not developed in "throw it over the wall once a year" fashion but completely in the open, all work is done in the public repo, on public issue trackers, public design documents, roadmaps, etc. Its really quite exceptional in this regard and is really one of the big reasons why its really close to foundation/consortium style projects (think Apache, Eclipse, Linux, Rust) than a single-corp sponsored one.
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.
Oh I'm sure plenty of that happens, but that's true of all SDKs. Plenty of people do that with Android Views, plenty of people do that with Swift UI, etc. I have no reason to believe that Flutter is particularly different from the others in terms of the proportion of apps of this kind.
> Totally agree, it seemed more to me people were hired for this vs expanding elsewhere.
Ah, no. We've hired more engineers for iOS work in the past few months, but the games toolkit was mostly devrel and a contractor, if I recall correctly. Similarly for things like the pinball demo or the Wonderous app, those are primarily done by contracting an agency rather than people on the Flutter team, with the agency's feedback directly feeding into the engineering team's priorities. So for example, Wonderous was great because during its development it helped us find a whole bunch of issues we needed to fix.
> 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
Again, the various areas aren't comparable or exchangeable. For example, Canonical is contributing to the Linux port, but it's not like Canonical would ever contribute to the iOS port, after all, their interest is in using Flutter on Ubuntu. Similarly, people Google hires to work on the iOS port are typically not the kind of people who want to work on Android or Windows, and so on. There's lots of areas of specialization, and if you task people to work on areas they're not experts on and not interested in, you're just going to burn them out and get low-quality work.
Even if people were commodities and interchangeable, though, I don't think it makes sense to focus on one area at the exclusion of another. There is more value in Flutter being able to target seven platforms (Android, iOS, Windows, macOS, Linux, web, and Fuchsia) well, than there would be in targeting just one platform completely perfectly. Especially because the effort to get from zero to excellent is much less than the effort required to get from excellent to perfect. Flutter is not unique in this. Kotlin isn't perfect on Android, but that doesn't mean JetBrains should avoid working on web support. C++ isn't perfect on AT&T Unix, but that doesn't mean people shouldn't implement it on other platforms. HTML isn't perfect for documents, but that doesn't mean we should not have extended it to applications. My house's kitchen isn't perfect, but I still want a bedroom.
> I have my opinion that the base is people who deal with the language / framework on a nearly weekly basis
By that definition, I am not a programmer, because there's literally no language that I use every week. Indeed, there are entire weeks where I don't write any code at all!
Looks like Chris is working on that one. (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.) (Also, that issue is a good example of the tools that we use to test this stuff.)
> 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.
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.