Ask HN: Is Google Killing Flutter | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Is Google Killing Flutter

4 pointsssahoo8 comments

Google has a pretty good history of killing stuff up. Recently they laid off a lot of people from flutter team right before its developer conf and now actively promoting Kotlin multi platform, which is a competing framework for developing cross platform apps. Any CTO choosing flutter should take a cautionary note. Its not encouraging for developers to investing in a half assed tech either. So the question is is Google testing water before the pull the plug on flutter.

https://developers.googleblog.com/en/google-kotlinconf-2024-a-look-inside-multiplatform-development-with-kmp-and-more/

https://techcrunch.com/2024/05/01/google-lays-off-staff-from-flutter-dart-python-weeks-before-its-developer-conference/

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According to someone in a Flutter community I’m in, they say they are not. Here’s a tweet https://x.com/misvth/status/1785767966815985893

> No strategy changes.

This implies that they are driving aimlessly.

> No change in team size; some DevOps roles moving to new locations.

Except for when they laid people off as per this article.

https://techcrunch.com/2024/05/01/google-lays-off-staff-from...

At best there is a skeleton crew maintaining Flutter.

This is pretty much incorrect. Laying off devops people (and actually offshoring those jobs to Europe so the actual devops team size is not even decreased) means nothing in regards to the actual developers working on Flutter and Dart. It is not a "skeleton crew" and nothing you cited shows that it is.

Flutter had devops? I thought it was just a developer framework. Do they offer any backend service?

Devops for running new builds of the framework internally, not for offering backend services to end developers.

Google didn't just target flutter with layoffs. They also run a number of there apps on the framework, and, unless I'm mistaken, kotlin is no where near flutter in terms of functionality. Not to mention flutter is open source, so they cannot kill it, only stop funding development.

Do you mean Kotlin Multiplatform isn't near Flutter? Because that might be the framework to compare to, but it's by JetBrains and not Google.

Flutter is a pet project for Google, so they will most likely kill Flutter, Firebase and anything that isn't part of their Generative AI strategy.

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