In my experience Google’s OSS projects have a high bar and have a less kafkaesque leadership than Google products. Now, one issue is that all tech that’s derivative of Google, ie Bazel, Go or k8s, tends to have “blind spots” where some parts are ignored because it’s not a need internally. The prime example would be Go’s utter garbage dependency management prior to go mod, which came very late. This wasn’t much of a priority for Google because they had their monorepo. (Nowadays it’s all dandy though). Conversely, what oss language writes sanitizers, race detectors, coverage checkers, migration tooling etc? Only the big guys do, and that can be quite nice for the rest of us.

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.