Flutter seems to be gaining ground on React Native. And they also have web and desktop ports.
Recently flutter overtook react native on Google trends.
I seriously hope that Flutter fades. It's very dangerous in many ways. Even ignoring the huge downsides of basically having a new Flash, consider this: the massive Flutter layer is, surprise surprise, yet another Google project that is magically _significantly_ slower in Firefox. I don't mean a small difference here, I mean that on a brand new fancy flagship I tested on, Flutter in Chrome is buttery smooth and Flutter in Firefox is a miserable, laggy experience. If it gets popular, this will become yet another reason pushing people off Firefox and cementing Google's dominance of the web.
Flutter is a very, very dangerous thing.
My personal hope is that Flutter gains traction and the web can move beyond current web/native technology. Postscript / PDFs aren't suitable for game experiences...and to my mind web standards have been shoehorned into supporting web apps, where there is a mismatch with native technologies. I'd like to think that Flutter can help bridge that gap.
This is not to say that accessibility etc. should be ignored...nor better support in Firefox...but even Brendan Eich is using Blink/V8 with Brave.
Anyhow, thoughts of one.
I loved what Flex brought to the table. Too bad Adobe didn’t open source flash and let it die.
Having worked with/on React Native for ~3 years I am definitely not a fan but at least React Native enables using native components directly even if this happens too rarely.
You lose all advantages that HTML and CSS gives you, links, styling, accessibility, text selection! ... It's basically a flash website... Which admittedly is okay for some applications
Flutter for Web is still on Beta, so lets see where it lands. Today, it seems to implement some PWA practices and lazyloading to try and get some performance.
Checkout the official [1] Flutter web demos. Even the simplest [2] example renders basically every part of the UI (including text!!) within canvas elements, which is a bit crazy to me... but yes it's still Beta, so we'll see what they can improve
Admittedly I need to go back and check but it was confusing and worrisome.
How did you query this? I want to have a look, but the fact "flutter" shows data since 2004 means the terms I'm using are inflated [1]. Flutter is a dictionary word after all.
[1]: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=r...
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=react%20...
The biggest gripe I have with React-Native is the many JS packages on npm that we can't use due to how the code is exported. It's a huge hack job, which Flutter absolutely destroyed by having everything I needed as a package that just worked.
One thing I'm looking at on Flutter, is how their public packages age. If I can't use a 3 year old package on modern day Flutter, there will be some big problems coming soon.
That said, there's an effort in the community to find maintainers for older packages that people find useful. If you come across something that you need, post back, or shoot me an email.
It's mostly the browser's ecosystem moved away from these for more standard based approaches.
FWIW, I think your criticism is broadly valid, in that it's more of an exception for Microsoft, but much more common for Google. It's not hard to look at the Windows dev ecosystem, and see which parts of it are very stable, and likely to be around long term - because they have already been around for very long indeed.
Silverlight in other hand is a technology no modern web browsers support (in the same camp with gradually deprecated Flash and everything that requires plugins.), and perhaps to Microsoft it's a lot less justifiable to update it beyond security update.
[0] https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/1555...
I am curious about how often this sentiment gets brought up about Go or Kubernetes.
flutter on the other hand is tremendously complex, and has yet to display any major company having bet their future on it.
There may come a time when this applies to Go.
Postgres is not new. It was part of my stack 10 years ago. So many new people have moved to postgres it has become hot.
Splice is now on flutter, including web. I'd say that is a pretty demanding app.
I watched their talk video [1] and they seemed to have only built an MVPish app using Flutter (ie, less than a year using it + a team of two devs). And it only seems to be for the desktop app?
Maybe I'm missing where they are using it on the web... but I wouldn't call this a huge buy in.
GP asked for evidence of Google abandoning things, and Angular.js is exactly that.
Upgrading to an incompatible framework is not supporting the old one.
Every major revision of software has breaking changes (or as you call them, "incompatibilities"), some more than others (see Python 2 -> 3).
That doesn't mean it's "abandoned". Google made major API changes and renamed it to better communicate that it's not some simple JS framework – calling that abandoned is disingenuous. It's only abandoned in-so-far as every old version of every software ever gets abandoned at some point.
I cannot upgrade.
I have to port, due to the backwards-incompatible changes.
Those changes may well be for the better, but for those of us maintaining stable programs, porting means increasing risk of failure for no perceivable end user benefit.
Microsoft is much better at supporting old tools and software, at least historically.
Not exactly abandoned - it seems to have been maintained for 10 years, although no stable release for the last couple of years.
It does feel like it would have been a dead end to get into though.
My worry with Flutter is the same - it won't get large enough adoption by other tech companies, and Google will move on to something else.
I think it'll still hang out as open source project. But will it get the large investment to make improvements as the various OSs change over the long time?