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firecall

Question for OP:

Obviously you are committed to Flutter and Dart.

Where do you see it going, broadly?

I’ve used Flutter a small amount and enjoyed it.

But it’s a hard sell to commit fully to it.

The alternatives of native tooling on iOS, Android and the web are not contentious choices.

Whereas suggesting to a team or decision maker that Flutter is the right choice seems like it could be an uphill battle!

As a solo dev making choices for clients that want a cross platform solution I can pitch Flutter as a somewhat rational choice against the cost of seperate builds for iOS and Android. Maybe, depending….

Then there’s the Google factor… what if they get bored and kill Flutter!?

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These are reasonable concerns.

Having seen the development of Flutter and its ecosystem over the past 7 years, I've come to really believe in the framework and its mission. There have been lots of companies which have found success building with Flutter [1] and it very often speaks to their bottom lines [2].

I'm hopeful for its continued success, but more importantly, I believe that having more companies building enterprise solutions makes the technology more attractive and practical to adopt. The founder of Flutter has started Shorebird [3] and the FlutterFlow team recently closed a $25M Series A [4]. These are great investments to have into Flutter.

Another cool stat: Dart was the fastest growing programming language among all languages last year at 33%! [5]

All that to say, I believe the business value of Flutter is becoming clear and I think having more companies building on top will reduce adoption risk and create a very rich ecosystem for further progress.

[1] https://flutter.dev/showcase

[2] https://assets-global.website-files.com/5ee12d8e99cde2e20255...

[3] https://shorebird.dev/

[4] https://techcrunch.com/2024/01/11/flutterflow-attracts-cash-...

[5] https://www.developernation.net/resources/reports/state-of-t...

When I go to flutter examples and go to the first one

https://flutter.github.io/samples/web/material_3_demo/

I find everything is rendered in a canvas. This means it's not accessibility friendly. It means none of my extensions work. It means no text can be selected (for example clicking the 3rd icon from the top left labeled "Typography". It also means none of the Browser/OS level features are available. I can't select a word and pick "look up" or "define" or "speak". It's shows ugly monochrome non native emoji. It takes second to show non-English characters while it downloads non-English fonts

How is this a win for the user?

I can’t speak for web but mobile apps written in Flutter are accessible https://docs.flutter.dev/ui/accessibility-and-internationali....

I downloaded the flutter sdk abd built a sample app. it had the similar issues to the web app.

Flutter tooling is superior to that of native iOS and Android development. It's not just about the cost savings from avoiding separate builds: Developing a Flutter app is generally easier than developing a separate app for either Android or iOS. And the developer experience is way better too.

Google is not killing Flutter. Despite Google's rep, Flutter is a highly successful project that Google uses for many of its own products, including Google Pay, Google Classroom, and Google Ads. It's also used by other major companies: https://flutter.dev/showcase.

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