I've no idea how to measure that.
> Your team was asked approximately this question by a MSFT employee looking at publishing info on cross platform framework adoption vs native and could not get a straight answer I was told.
I mean, there's some questions we just don't have the answer to. I'm not sure what to tell you. We do share quite a lot of our data, e.g. from the quarterly surveys, as noted above; for most of your answers the numbers I just gave you can be found by Googling.
I would personally love to share more (e.g. I'd love for the analytics to be public) but there are significant privacy constraints around this. Even within the team, most people don't have access to the analytics data, and we're actually making an effort to limit that even more as part of our extensive efforts around tightening security.
I hope one day we can anonymize and aggregate the data to a level that satisfies Google's privacy team and then we'll be able to share the numbers in real time, but that won't be for some time (if ever, this stuff is hard).
> Multiple Flutter related posts by agencies and evangelists point to a google trends page or GH stars saying Flutter is blowing up in popularity compared to other frameworks
I would point to things like numbers of users or apps rather than vanity metrics like GitHub stars, but there we go.
> but when you start looking at core packages searched for and starred for each framework the Flutter trend reverses, is this because the words Flutter and Dart are too common and in actuality the popularity is not what is being projected in trends?
I would posit that it is because Google Trends data is a terrible way to measure popularity of an SDK.
> Is this because DevRels directly ask people to star the core project?
GitHub stars are purely a vanity metric. I would ignore them.
> I ask Flutter GDE's these questions and they come off like they can't be trusted to be honest on these topics for fear of losing status.
Feel free to tell them to reach out to me if they ever have a question about what they can or can't say.
> I have also heard a certain outspoken Flutter GDE mention on stream other frameworks have much larger communities, how can this jive with these purported trends?
Flutter is big and growing, but there are plenty of much bigger SDKs, certainly. I don't think that's a big secret. :-)
> It seems as though the community size and growth of Flutter is projected to be greater than it is, that's subjectively how it feels as a dev as well I will note as someone who is using packages / repos, and that is worrisome.
There are plenty of SDKs with much smaller communities that are very healthy and have been around for decades. I think it's reasonable to be concerned about ecosystem health, but I must say that personally I am quite happy with Flutter's ecosystem and community size and growth.
> I worry that the first time we hear solid numbers will be in a blog post about the Flutter project ending with an explanation that low enterprise adoption and direct or indirect revenue could not support the scale of this ambitious a project.
Well good news, the numbers you asked for have largely already been discussed publicly, so you need not have that specific worry.
> It would be great to hear some hard facts that give people confidence in adoption and that Flutter has long term backing higher in the company. If this is not the case, honesty would be nice as well.
I can't promise long-term backing from Google, because I'm not the CEO and ultimately it has to be his call. I can point to all the reasons Tim gave above for why there's no reason to expect Google to abandon Flutter any time soon, and I can point to the numbers I gave above as the "hard facts" you are looking for, or at least the closest things to them that one can have. Unfortunately with squishy things such as ecosystem size and how people use products and so on there is so much noise in the data, such big error bars, that anyone giving you precise numbers is selling you snake oil.
> @a14n seems to have tailed off on his work on Flutter quite a bit, which worries me if he is the core example of users who would pick this up in an OSS abandonment situation.
I think Tim just pointed to a14n because he's contributed so much over the years. No one person could take over the project and I certainly wouldn't put that on a14n's shoulders!! You can look at our GitHub and Discord activity to see how the project is doing in terms of non-Google contributors.
> Even now it feels as though if major OSS package maintainers like Remi Rousselet walked away the community would be hit hard.
We are a long way past there being any single person who is keeping the project afloat.
> I can't imagine the project continuing without Google, especially with Dart needing the same treatment if Flutter was killed. Dart issues with notes saying the team lacks bandwidth exist now, I just can't see it working even with some other companies interested, Flutter/Dart need full enterprise backing at this stage.
You never know. FreePascal is an example I love to point to; it's an open source project with minimal (if any) corporate/enterprise funding and yet they have been delivering reliably for decades now. I don't see why a dedicated team couldn't pick up Dart in the same way, if the interest was there.
> BUT, it still has the biggest complaint I hear about Flutter apps on iOS, feel.
The biggest complaint we hear is definitely jank, FWIW. :-)
> On iOS is does not feel native, the scrolling and gestures feel off.
If you have specific reproducible cases of this, please file bugs with test cases demonstrating it. The more concrete and specific you can be (e.g. high speed video showing the difference) the better.
We actually have built tools to verify that we are matching iOS physics to the pixel, so if there are cases where we're not, we would love to learn about them and fix them. (Unfortunately until recently we were mostly focused on lower-level issues on iOS, like performance and plugins, and have not had as much time to spend on widgets and physics. That's changing, though.)
> This is part of what I was referring to regarding ignoring polish on iOS in favor of expansion earlier, iOS still feels second class on Flutter.
We've made huge strides here in the past year, but yeah, we still have work to do.
> My final thought is the same as my first, be more transparent, show the community with tangible honest numbers and backing Flutter is not in jeopardy, otherwise the track record (and imho vague mushy pumped up stats) makes it appear it is.
As far as I can tell, we've been transparent, with most of the numbers you say you'd like us to share being numbers we have in fact shared already. The numbers are not made up, but yes, they are mushy. If you have any idea how to get less mushy numbers, join our Discord, help us out (the link to the Discord is in the contributor docs on GitHub).