Obviously the question that really needs answered is “does Flutter have a future?”
Given Google is notorious for killing popular products, the fact they just fired a bunch of people dedicated to make this product work and the rather niche nature of Dart and Flutter… all signs point to it being becoming an open source project.
Can it survive as an OSS project?
Anyway, Flutter! Yes technically it’s an “open source project” but really it’s halfway to product/platform, no? That’s probably a bad sign (not Googles fault but run-of-the-mill oss maintainers don’t typically excel at product and design decision making). Dart? Also probably a bad sign for obvious reasons. And if Google abandons it, I imagine there’s a lot of infra (for cross platform testing etc) that goes away, and that’s assuming Google gives flutter away to the community instead of staffing it with a skeleton crew until it fizzles out. (Maybe I’m missing something in how it’s governed though, let me know)
Yeah, personally I don’t think flutter can survive without the Google breathing apparatus. But it’s not impossible. We really need and deserve something like flutter. But is there enough value over Tauri/Electron etc where people can reuse their frontend stack sanely? I think it depends on how well the competition catches up with mobile support, which is the current pain point.
Disclaimer: ex-google, somewhat recent contributor to (and user of) tauri.
It's not a rhetoric question. I'm in need of a native application toolkit, and I gravitate towards Tauri for technical reasons. However, I'm not sure if the Tauri project has enough cash flow to sustain a durable alternative to Flutter, Qt, Avalonia, JavaFX, Compose Multiplatform, and likes.
Some companies might pick it but then they would only test the use cases they need or a personal fork. It would also sink without the Google brand to back it.
https://web.archive.org/web/20211218043000/https://twitter.c...
Now, I agree if Gluon ever goes away then JavaFX is certainly done.
Java and JavaFX are being ported to iOS and Android as Project Mobile under the official OpenJDK umbrella.
JavaFX fresh builds are also seen on jdk.java.net now.
As far as I am aware, Project Mobile doesn't have much uptake, outside companies that are already working with Gluon.
Swing remains a decent GUI toolkit, but it still requires native dependencies for stuff like OS file dialogs and other platform APIs, audio/video codecs, hardware-accelerated graphics.
Which is why alternative JDK distributions still offer JRE variants, while officially from Oracle's side one should either use plain JDK or jlink/jpackage.
Similar for Python.
> Do you believe Tauri can survive without a direct corporate backing, while Flutter can't?
Currently, I think tauri can survive yes. But I know much deeper the tauri community than flutter, where I’m just speculating as a bystander.
In fact, Tauri losing money would be much less bad than losing 1-3 of the core workhorses that are volunteers primarily afaik. This in fact is the biggest risk, imo. If any of them stop working it's gonna be really hard to recover, because they’re so autonomous and make sensible decisions.
But mostly flutter seems like a much more ambitious project, because they define UI and rely on Dart. Tauri and electron piggyback on browsers which imo is strategically and technically the only reasonable way to do it long term. They can almost exclusive focus on cross platform issues (which btw is an enormous undertaking on its own).