The message I'm getting from Google is that flutter is the future and will get more support eventually. You can also see it in their fuchsia os which is heavily focused on the ecosystem.
Keeping up to date native Android/iOS functionality by basically reimplementing it bugs and all is an endless demanding work requiring strong talent that will never be good enough for all your use cases and will churn anyone who works on it both from the work itself and the constant complaints of the community.
No other programming powerhouse would be willing to partake in this or even be able to keep up - you won't see an AirBnB, Microsoft or Wix commitment like you did with React-Native, where these companies were active contributors to the core and have low-level libraries of their own.
Google is the last company I'll put my money for doing long term maintenance on an open source project, let alone one with no prospect for monetization or search market-share.
There's really only one way that Flutter survives - and that's if somehow Android moves to it as a first class citizen.
This is immensely unlikely. And probably will doom Android. And in the impossible case where it will - it means iOS will become second citizen.
Google has said the same thing for tons of things, and then stop caring for them and supporting them.
Including Dart as a JS alternative, the very same technology now relegated to Flutter backend.
I would think long and hard before betting my company on any Google product.
Are there many third-party contributors to flutter? If so, that would make me feel a little more confident. If it's all (or almost all) Google staff, yeah... no. Wouldn't go there.
https://ubuntu.com/blog/flutter-and-ubuntu-so-far
tidbit - there is early support to build linux flutter apps on the raspberry pi. Would be good if android team offered arm builds of their tools, then it would be possible to build for android on the pi.
So if Ads, Pay and Search keep their support, Dart and Flutter are here to stay.
So my read of Flutter is it’s a way for talent to “ship and get promoted” inside Google or to support other Google product teams. Everyone else is a secondary priority.
“the Ads team at Google” is a very strange thing to treat as equivalent to “no one”.
Also, I'd be curious to hear what major advantages Kotlin would have for Flutter. The Flutter team has commented heavily on Dart's useful properties for Flutter's goals (small comment here, there are well written full articles as well: flutter.dev/docs/resources/faq#why-did-flutter-choose-to-use-dart).
The internal investment in Flutter is well beyond the average tech project at Google. I don't expect it to be abandoned any time soon.