The Flutter team's official blog on Medium, with release notes and announcements for Google's cross-platform UI toolkit.
HN links it for release announcements, Linux and web support, and accessibility posts, mostly while debating how well Flutter works on desktop and web.
Don't think so they are heavily invested in it. As Flutter PM wrote here on HN:
The reason you should feel confident to use Flutter is because it's strongly in our business interest to invest in it. Over 600,000 apps in the Play Store alone are already written using Flutter, to say nothing of the countless apps for iOS, Windows, macOS, Linux and web. The list includes big brands like Alibaba, BMW, eBay, and SHEIN. Neither Google as a whole, nor Android in particular would be better off if Flutter didn't continue to flourish.
Aside from that, there are thousands of engineers at Google who use Dart and Flutter internally to build a wide variety of apps. There are many millions of lines of code written that power everything from Ads to our internal CRM system. Google wouldn't be better off if we had to throw all that code away and start over.
Lastly, Flutter is very successful. It has a developer base of several million, is growing quickly, and developers tell us it makes them more productive (https://medium.com/flutter/does-flutter-boost-developer-prod...). Happy developers are a prerequisite for a wide variety of other Google APIs and services, so we have a vested interest in continuing that.
Even if it weren't for Google, there are more contributors to Flutter from outside Google than there are Flutter team employees. Those contributors include big companies like Samsung, Canonical and Sony, as well as prolific individual developers like @a14n (https://github.com/a14n).
I also worked at Google. Now I'm using Google's Flutter to build a mobile app. I worry that Flutter will stagnate and become unusable on mobile before I can afford native rewrites. Flutter's mobile support is already stagnating. Flutter Team has left many mobile features half-implemented: iOS widgets [0], dark mode [1], location [2], and camera [3]. They even hired an outside company to work on Flutter mobile extensions [4]. Flutter's engineers have moved on to web and desktop. Others have written [5] about this.
Beware depending on any Google tool for your business.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/FlutterDev/comments/d51o4w/were_the_flutter_team_at_google_ask_us_anything/f0jvwy6
[1] https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/80860
[2] https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/31453
[3] https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/70751
[4] https://medium.com/flutter/flutter-package-ecosystem-update-d50645f2d7bc#a69f
[5] https://www.reddit.com/r/FlutterDev/comments/ju2zza/flutters_biggest_problem/
I think you're missing the point of touch mode: mouse and touch actually work fine in both modes. The touch mode is just there to demonstrate how Flutter adapts the layout depending on the target modality: see how the controls get larger when you select touch mode.
The Medium post[1] about Web support explains some adaptations they made for Desktop browser, including:
We also increased the default content density, because mouse pointers support a tighter density than touch devices.
I expect that in a "real" app the default mode is adapted automatically based on the device type.
[1] https://medium.com/flutter/flutter-web-support-hits-the-stable-milestone-d6b84e83b425
It has the relevance that many Google teams prefer it to Kotlin, hence internal politics.
Jetpack Compose is clearly a counter movement from Android team.
https://medium.com/flutter/announcing-flutter-2-2-at-google-i-o-2021-92f0fcbd7ef9
https://www.press.bmwgroup.com/global/article/detail/T0328610EN/the-my-bmw-app-new-features-and-tech-insights-for-march-2021
https://devclass.com/2020/10/29/sony-takes-a-flutter-on-embedded-system-interfaces/
https://stadia.dev/intl/es_es/blog/how-flutter-helped-us-make-stadia-controller-setup-better-for-users/
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/surface-duo/flutter-dual-screen-foldable/
> Anyone know what went wrong in there?
Knowing, I don’t know, could be related though…
Google Earth uses Flutter on web, too, which is in my opinion, the platform where Flutter is giving its users the worst experience.
Though the root cause of the bug could also be non-Flutter related, because in Google Earth’s case, Flutter mainly just wraps the interesting bits (maps stuff in c++???) with a unified UI skin.
And does Google break Firefox all the time on purpose? Good question…
https://medium.com/flutter/extreme-ui-adaptability-in-flutter-how-google-earth-supports-every-use-case-on-earth-6db4661e7a17
According to [1], there are more than 90,000 Flutter apps on the play store, growing at over 10,000 per month. Now to be fair many of these are low quality throw away apps, but there some significant apps including Hamilton, and Google Stadia.
In addition, flutter runs in a whole bunch of places, including native desktop apps and of course Fuschia.
I am coming to the opposite conclusion. Flutter is a massive hit - and I think Google is smart enough to know they have a a winner on their hands. Flutter isn't going anywhere.
[1] https://medium.com/flutter/announcing-flutter-1-20-2aaf68c89c75