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Comment by matchbok | Hacker News Reader

Please don't use or support Flutter. Its entire existence is to replace the web and force more ads to people. Do your research.

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"Do your research" coupled with unsourced assertions is always an interesting argument :)

As the product lead for Flutter, I can assure you that this isn't an accurate statement. The product is several years old now, and we only added ads support in the last three months, in response to customer requests (https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/12114).

Flutter is open source, welcomes non-Google contributors, and is led by a group of hackers who think that UI development shouldn't be as painful as it is. One might have thought this would be attractive to the kind of developers who hang out on HN :)

I think to say that its entire existence is a conspiracy to replace the web is a bit much, and I'm sure that the engineers creating it have good intentions. But that doesn't mean Google, the business, doesn't see the value to its bottom line. Google is and will always be an advertising company. Flutter may make UI development less painful for developers, but it takes control out of the users' hands. The web is great, despite painful UI development, because as a user I can adjust it to my liking, namely remove advertisements, tracking, and other annoyances.

AMP was supposed to speed up the web for mobile users. I'm sure the engineers that worked on AMP believed they were doing that too.

Certainly Google sees value in Flutter, otherwise we wouldn’t fund it to the tune of 100+ engineers. But our motivations are less malevolent than you might assume. Here is our strategy doc, which we publish in the open (not many products can say that, I think): https://medium.com/flutter/flutter-in-2022-strategy-and-road...

I read your strategy doc, and it doesn't change anything I said. Front and center is your commitment to developer experience, which is great, but what seems woefully absent is consideration for the end-user. I'm sure that you'll eventually get around to things like accessibility and bring them up to par with what we already have. It's worth saying that nothing should be built for production using Flutter until that's taken care of, but enough people have already said it.

What's absent is a commitment to empower end-users in the same way that the web does now. Your doc puts the developer front and center, but "developer" can be read two ways: the person writing code who wants good tools that make their job a delight, or The Business that wants tools to enable them to deliver products that the end user cannot open open the hood and tinker with. A consistent UI toolkit that lets you develop once and deliver to six platforms is great for the coder, and if in the process it just so happens that the frontend is reduced to indecipherable pixels that can't be modified, ads that can't be blocked, and tracking that can't be escaped, well, that's just perfect for The Business.

I don't doubt you or your team's sincere good intentions. I really don't. But after pulling stunts like AMP, Tag Manager, FLoC/Topics, etc. Google, the business, doesn't deserve a charitable interpretation. It's like Prisoners of Geography. Google is an advertising company, and always will be. Regardless of the ideology or stated goals of the day, everything they do is to sell ads. If Flutter allows Google to display more ads and collect more data, and Google is funding the development of Flutter, it stands to reason that Google is purposefully pushing Flutter because Flutter will allow them to sell more ads and subvert user privacy.

Again, lipstick on a pig.

> Do your research" coupled with unsourced assertions is always an interesting argument :)

It’s worse than an argument because their comment is not an argument.

They themselves need to substantiate their claims first before demanding evidence from someone else.

Off topic: any plans for Delphi-like GUI RAD IDE? When I see some non-trivial Flutter UI code - it ought to have been generated by machine.

There's a good UI design environment emerging from FlutterFlow: https://flutterflow.io

There's also a great Flash-like vector-based animation designer called Rive, which is itself written in Flutter (and generates code for Flutter): https://rive.app

Any open source options?

Do you have any citations to support this claim?

Flutter is open source.

How it being an open source would help ad blocking on the client side? It certainly won't be as easy as current blocking methods for html/css/js.

You know it’s ok to say “I’ve made an emotional baseless assertion backed up with no evidence”.

I hate google as much as next person on HN, but at least have some evidence.

Not OP, and can't comment on Google's hidden intentions, but it does have a point - any such open source Flash replacements would make ad blocking harder.

So is AMP

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