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Comment by punduk | Hacker News Reader

Are there any statistics on how much of it is used in production?

https://flutter.dev/showcase has a few examples. Flutter is everywhere at this point. TikTok in China (Douyin), PUBG Mobile, MGM Resorts, eBay Motors, Kijiji.com, Grab are a few off the top of my head. And of course a whole bunch of Google apps (GPay, Earth, Classroom, etc.), Toyota cars, LG TVs, Google's own hardware devices, etc. Tonal is probably the app I used most often that's Flutter. Caribou Coffee, Betterment, Norwegian Cruise Lines, NuBank, Realtor.com are other random apps I've used that are Flutter.

small nit: many daily driver apps in China are partially Flutter. But TikTok is not at the present

small nit: douyin is. is it possible you read "TikTok in China (Douyin)" as "TikTok in America"?

Do you have a source for that claim? I'm pretty sure that is incorrect. Bytedance has said they use Flutter but for other projects.[0] Douyin is not mentioned anywhere.

[0] https://flutter.dev/showcase/bytedance

I don't have access to any devices with Douyin on it, so I cannot confirm current usage.

My knowledge of their usage is from discussions with ByteDance some many years ago when I was in charge of the Flutter project at Google. At the time they were using Flutter in 50+ applications (probably most of them internal), including Douyin (TikTok for China) as well as physical hardware kiosks on their campus, web apps, etc.

https://flutter.dev/showcase/bytedance

I just tested Douyin 23.5 from 2022[0] and it does not have the two finger scroll bug.[1] It is of course possible they were carrying their own patch for it all this time but that seems unlikely. I doubt they are using Flutter or if they did it must have been a long time ago.

[0] https://douyin.en.uptodown.com/android/download/87248716

[1] https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/11884 - click on the search button in Douyin on the main page and search for something to get to a regular ScrollView. You don't need an account for this.

Flutter two finger scroll "bug" is gone.

I wouldn't say its unlikely they carried a patch for it, I just wrote a framework patch that I apply at build time in CI and locally.

I refuse to sideload arbitrary APKs, especially from bytedance. I feel bad because that is irrational, you did, and it'd be really helpful if I did and just did this myself, but, you should install FlutterShark and check: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.fluttersha...

>Flutter two finger scroll "bug" is gone.

Why is "bug" in scare quotes here? It was most definitely a bug.

>I wouldn't say its unlikely they carried a patch for it, I just wrote a framework patch that I apply at build time in CI and locally.

The actual fix was pretty involved. I doubt a large company like Bytedance would want to carry around extra patches at the gesture level that make the dev cycle more difficult. Having one person carry a patch on their local machine is a different story.

Anyway, the Bytedance blogpost says only 200 devs are using Flutter which would make no sense if it was used in Douyin, and LibChecker[0] returns no results for libflutter.so.

[0] https://github.com/LibChecker/LibChecker

> Why is "bug" in scare quotes here? It was most definitely a bug.

Is it? I thought it was cool, I can't think of why its disruptive to scroll a list faster if you scroll with more fingers.

> I doubt a large company like Bytedance would want to carry around extra patches at the gesture level

I'm a solo endeavour, and I spent ~30 minutes to do exactly this (patch gesture behavior) two days ago. I was stunned how easy it is. But I grew up on versioned closed source dependencies on Apple iOS frameworks that you had to patch the runtime at runtime to fix, so I'm easily wowed.

> 200 devs are using Flutter which would make no sense if it was used in Douyin

Seems reductive: "Only" 200 fulltime, 800 in the company...and we're in a discussion about how 50 maintain _the entire framework_. :)

Yes, via the Flutter founder here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41975474

If you have an Android phone, get FlutterShark and check which of your installed apps use Flutter. It's a surprising amount actually. For example, I just recently discovered that Supercell uses Flutter for their Supercell-ID flow.

It was 8 out of 86 apps for me (9% of my apps). Including Hacki, the HN client. It's a good variety of apps too, from big billion dollar companies to tiny games I downloaded from F-Droid.

I have a pretty limited understanding of mobile sandboxing, but how does FlutterShark have access to analyse all the apps on my phone?

>android.permission.INTERNET

>android.permission.QUERY_ALL_PACKAGES

>com.google.android.gms.permission.AD_ID

>android.permission.ACCESS_NETWORK_STATE

>android.permission.WAKE_LOCK

>android.permission.FOREGROUND_SERVICE

seems like imo the type of thing you should be prompted for but what do I know

Since the beginning of Android apps could see what other apps were installed on your phone without asking for special permission.

They finally added a permission for it - QUERY_ALL_PACKAGES - in Android 11 (2020). Unfortunately it's one of those stupid permissions like filesystem access where you have to apply for it via a form, and only whitelisted use cases are allowed:

> Permitted uses involve apps that must discover any and all installed apps on the device, for awareness or interoperability purposes may have eligibility for the permission. Permitted uses include device search, antivirus apps, file managers and browsers.

I suppose that situation is slightly better than "anyone can do it for any reason".

FlutterShurk says 3 apps on my phone use Flutter. Device Info (a different app) reports that's 0.2% of all my apps...

I only got one (ASDA), I'm pretty sure it's just a webview though so I'm not sure why they are using Flutter.

Hard to say it is "everywhere". It's probably more popular than any of the other cross platform alternatives though.

There are 25 on mine, so ymmv

Interesting to check, thanks for the tip. I have 6 Flutter apps, half of which I had assumed to be in React Native.

I had about 30 apps. That surprised me.

If there would be 1M flutter devs per year and on average team had 10 devs (rather rare most mobile teams would be smaller except really big apps) and development of app would take ~1 year you would expect minimum 100k new flutter apps in app store every year. That seems highly unlikely.

I suspect there's a lot of larger apps out there which use Flutter for one feature or set of screens but the majority of the app isn't written in Flutter. You could have a team of 100 working on a app where only three of them actually touch flutter on a regular basis, but depending on how exactly you capture analytics all 100 of them may get counted.

I agree. Flutter is a project I like, but the numbers given regarding statistics remind me of this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A-RfHC91Ewc

I‘ve worked for over a year, almost full time, on an internal Flutter app that never saw the light of day (maybe later, if the stars align). Many apps just get their support section revamped with Flutter because there’s no need for that to look fancy; but they‘ll still count against that quota. Many devs prototype their side projects with Flutter, but never release them. Etc

I'm pretty sure many/most professional app developers are in long-term projects, working on the same app(s) year after year. So for those devs the app count never goes up. That's at least my experience -- development work only stops when the app is pulled off the stores for business reasons.

I can share an example from our company’s experience:

- 5 years using Flutter - 31 full-time devs - 3 platforms (iOS, Android, and Web) - 1.3 million monthly active users

Overall, we’re very happy with our decision to use Flutter

Other anecdotal apps: Google Analytics mobile app. BetRivers online sportsbook (one of the largest in the US).

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