On the budget / funding side I understand not all details can be shared, I think the general gist is just the broad question of what can effect flutter funding. It sounds like Stadia shut down won't, but I see that question was also raised on Reddit, so clarity on that was appreciated beyond myself I am sure, and any more would be appreciated as well.
On internal apps, I know Flutter is being used, this sort of leaks into PRs, comments, etc, but I think the question I was getting at is if that has enough value to google. On the outward facing apps this is definitely a matter of perception, I don't think I need to expand there.
The hobby projects, I think this is hard to define but is a classic you know it when you see it. The result of a single Udemy course, something that serves 0 to few users (most of whom are the devs friends), something not actively being developed, something where the code base is quite small, etc. Projects done and published for the sake of learning more than their use to others is likely where I would draw the line. I think there is another line at profitable / paid dev, but I would say the lesser line is appropriate. I think the wider question is how many people are getting enough value out of Flutter that it truly translates into value for Google that is worth sustaining, definitely not an easy question to answer.
> I'm not sure what you're suggesting here. Our work on iOS is entirely orthogonal to the work on the Casual Games Toolkit, it's not like the people who worked on one could work on the other.
This is still hard for me to swallow. Codegen for json deserialization, data types, general slowdown in the analysis server at scale, the list feels long, I would have to dive into the current issues to get them all. But coming from other languages / frameworks there is an incompleteness that feels more important to address than games no matter what a survey says. Saying they are orthogonal is denying resources/funds could be used differently for different goals. The Stadia link was simply it seems growing Flutter user base has a priority over polish, and with an internal app shutting down it seemed growth could itself grow in importance over polish.
> <50% are "hobby" > 500,000 MAUs
Thank you! This!! This gives some idea of how many devs are truly working on Flutter worldwide. These numbers make much more sense to me and what I see!"It has a developer base of several million", I felt like this was gaslighting me as I could not see where all these devs existed, how were stackoverflow issues that seemed like they should be semi-common with 0 to 1 replies!? This did not jive with millions of dev, even a small percent working at enterprise scale, and did not fit with my experience working on other frameworks that claim similar scales.
> I would point to things like numbers of users or apps rather than vanity metrics like GitHub stars, but there we go.
> I would posit that it is because Google Trends data is a terrible way to measure popularity of an SDK.
> Flutter is big and growing, but there are plenty of much bigger SDKs, certainly. I don't think that's a big secret. :-)
Combine the use of these two stats being heavily pushed in blogs etc with the, "It has a developer base of several million", quote, mix in first hand observations that they feel off, and the feeling the team is hiding something starts to manifest. Especially when blog posts turn these stats into proof through twisting that Flutter is for lack of a better term, "the biggest". Thank you for noting these are vanity numbers, imho pushing them does a disservice. I will also submit that at 5 years old continuing to push the narrative that Flutter is "new" and the nearest competitor only has any gains do that that gap starts to get some side eyes.
> We are a long way past there being any single person who is keeping the project afloat.
Agreed, but still it feels like there are a few big hitters, it does not go unnoticed where he works and I am guessing is sorta paid by proxy by Google.
> I don't see why a dedicated team couldn't pick up Dart in the same way, if the interest was there.
Agreed on Dart, I think Flutter is another matter though.
> The biggest complaint we hear is definitely jank, FWIW. :-)
>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.
These feel tied together, I mean this in a honest way and not to offend the team, but does anyone on the team use iOS full time and run Flutter apps on device in prod regularly (just cruise ebay motors?)? I talk to other iOS users and this is a well known issue, scroll acceleration is off (scroll fast and it's WAY off), there is an issue already posted for Flutter with scroll being a full frame behind native so the location / perceptions feels off at first touch, and pull to refresh is a bit janky at times. "We actually have built tools to verify that we are matching iOS physics to the pixel" I mean no offense, but is something code wise wrong in the tooling? As a full time iOS user it's VERY obvious, you feel it and see it, my friend literally deleted an app due to it after using it for seconds, it's not just a vague complaint, it's highly perceivable.
> We've made huge strides here in the past year, but yeah, we still have work to do.
TY
> 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.
I have gotten more info from this post than anything else I have read on the state of Flutter, appreciate it.