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Comment by Larrikin | Hacker News Reader

But they also fund JetBrains, Jetpack Compose, and KMP. It feels like the company threw their support behind Kotlin a long while ago on mobile, but internal struggles keep the others limping along. Compose UI tooling no longer requires viewing on device.

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You're thinking of Google as a single top down company. It isn't. Think of it as an anarchy of warlords where each pulls the strings and management doesn't really know what's going on.

Flutter made a lot of sense during the Oracle lawsuit when Google needed a way to show Oracle that it can pivot from Java. Now it no longer makes sense but the inertia is too deep.

My guess is that flutter is sold internally through the Huawei support as a leg within China.

Only because it was cheaper to migrate Android to Kotlin instead of Dart. JetBrains needs Google more than Google needs JetBrains.

There are several clues that the reasons were more political than monetary, including some former team members like Jake Warton remarks on Dart.

Note that Dart or Flutter are nowhere to be found on Android developer documentation.

At the time Google went with Kotlin, Flutter was still very new and a much bigger step away from Java given Kotlin already back then was seamlessly integrated with Java and compiled to JVM bytecode.

Android used to be its own kingdom separate from rest of Google. And maybe still is.

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