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Comment by RcouF1uZ4gsC | Hacker News Reader

> Secondly (and this can be seen as both a flaw and an advantage), both Flutter and Dart come from Google. The good part of it is that Google is a tech giant, and if they want to maintain something, they have the resources and manpower to do it. The bad part is that while Google is known to introduce useful tech and services, it’s also known to kill off or retire them when they’re deemed obsolete.

I think over time the crippling of Google’s developer initiatives because of this perception will cost a lot more than all the money saved from all the retired services.

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I don't think so (and I'm the type of person to never miss a good Google bashing). And here's the hot take i'll make for it: Google is not solely responsible for the bad PR they get for prematurely retiring popular services.

Often this is a conundrum of naive technologists clamoring to shove untested tools into production for... reasons? Excitement? Risk-taking adrenaline? I'm not quite sure.

Yes Google's marketing oversells (or even lies a la Google Stadia), but at the end of the day I think Google SREs/devs/evangelists expect (wrongly) some measure of common sense and restraint from users and that is just not there. For example, if you ever watched some of Kelsey Hightower's earlier kubernetes talks he practically begs users to deeply consider their use case and whether or not they should actually be using kubernetes.

Google also expects their users to SRE/devops/refactor/upgrade constantly like they're able to. Which is also insanely unrealistic.

Ultimately, while some cases are Google's fault, often the blame is shared - most of the time. The market realizes this and thus the opportunity cost is already priced in somehow.

>Often this is a conundrum of naive technologists clamoring to shove untested tools into production for... reasons? Excitement? Risk-taking adrenaline? I'm not quite sure.

My understanding is that you get promoted at Google for launching new things, not for maintaining them, so there's a perverse incentive to launch projects that become orphans almost immediately. So much so that I wouldn't even say that they retire popular services prematurely, but that because there is no institutional will nor support for these projects to survive into the future, they are simply de-launching proofs of concepts. Translation: nothing is intended to survive at Google besides search and AdWords, and everything else is subject to cancellation at any moment without warning.

I'm not sure what you're saying about sharing blame, that these products are too popular? I'm not sure that's a sufficient reason, but it would certainly explain Google's overarching product strategy through the decades.

I think it's a dichotomy where half of the thinking is bonus-oriented as you describe, and the other half is them wrongly assuming all users think/work as they do and will thoroughly evaluate before making a meaningful decision to purchase or put into production (because surely everyone has massive SRE/QA budgets and only does 10 hours of relevant work a week and the rest is for deep optimization). Thus you get the outcome of releasing beta products and then be surprised when either the product is a disappointment, or it gets yanked later due to poor/unideal adoption.

> I'm not sure what you're saying about sharing blame, that these products are too popular? I'm not sure that's a sufficient reason, but it would certainly explain Google's overarching product strategy through the decades.

I'm not sure if it's sufficient cause either, I just try to peel back the onion to understand more then just "those people are dumb profiteers with simple minds making simple mistakes". Also I think it yields some unique insight into my own work/coding/life when I identify the deeper subconscious flaws in product development.

In addition to what you said, I feel that may be Google's view of a viable project (business-wise) is different from many others, hence any real drive to continue these POCs long term.

If we look at main projects/products at Google like Chrome, Search, Gmail, Android, YouTube, Maps, Kuberenetes none of them has any serious competitors out there (except for Android perhaps). I mean, sure we technologists are more aware of alternatives and open to try new things but almost every average user I know is utterly uninterested in an alternative. There's a perception of Google as simply being the most technologically capable company on the planet for average users and that any alternative simply can't match, let alone surpass, Google's offering. Sometimes, when I think about, there's some truth to the latter part of that sentiment. Google does a good job with the projects that actually last.

So, perhaps any project that can't have a similar traction in the market probably doesn't get a whole lot of attention on a collective level.

Chrome has competitors! It has majority market share, but other browsers get usage too.

I think the risk of Flutter getting cancelled is very remote. Google knows they have a winner on their hands.

Flutter is the UI framework for Fuschia. It is picking up huge momentum [1]. The support for native apps and web[2] is still immature, but promising.

Flutter brings the joy back into UI development. No messing with CSS, tables, etc. - "everything is a widget" makes for a very composable framework that is super fun to use.

[1] https://redmonk.com/sogrady/2020/02/28/language-rankings-1-2... [2] https://flutter.dev/web

I don't see any reason Google wouldn't cancel Fuchsia at a moment's notice. It's been consuming their resources for years and is far from launching in a product, and Google happily cancels even established well-used products.

I don’t know why people tried to hide your post. Yes, it’s entirely plausible that Fuchsia is killed in favor of Android evolution not revolution.

Plausible, but i wouldn’t put odds on anything.

LUCKILY, for me because i really like Flutter, I think it hits critical mass soon and wouldn’t matter if Google killed Fuchsia.

You both say this but the interesting thing is that Fuchsia support is creeping up in more essential low level software like LLVM, Rust, WebKit and the devs actually have Chrome already running on the platform for years. Dart/Flutter is used throughout the OS and used in many apps today.

From day 0 on launch, you can expect Fuchsia to run your Dart apps and to run existing Android apps via a tool called Machina (Zircon hypervisor running Linux kernel). If Fuchsia benefits from the Flutter apps being made and gives Google more complete control over the OS unlike Android, then it looks highly unlikely that it will be killed.

In reality as Fuchsia is being ’dog-fooded’ on Google devices it is increasingly likely that Android will be killed.

The fact that ChromeOS had to gain Android support speaks loudly about what might win in the end.

If Fuchsia ever gets released, I bet ART will replace Flutter.

It is already being ported to run on Fuchsia anyway.

ART isn't a UI framework, it can't "replace" Flutter. You can run Flutter apps in ART, the article even talks about doing so.

Indeed it the basis of the Android stack, so it plugs naturally with everything written in Java and Kotlin for Android.

Flutter has zero relationship with ART, it just plugs into Android via the NDK, like anyone else using C++ code.

I'm pretty sure they either use it on the Nest Hub or are close to it.

Fuschia seems like the type of project that's begging to be canceled.

FuCHSia

One more thing: the entire Google Ads Frontend has been re-written in Dart. This was a very significant, multi-year investment which usually happens at most once in a decade. And... this particular product gives paychecks to everyone else, of course including the Dart team (and core infra team as well).

Dart is picking "huge momentum" and to prove that claim, you link a graph that shows it at rank... I don't know, about 30 or so, which probably amounts to 0.01% mind share.

Where's that "huge" momentum?

This is the opposite of huge momentum.

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