Comment by well_ackshually
17 days ago
Flutter is fine if you don't care about performance, accessibility, have no need to access native capabilities or non-fluttered widgets (ex: the Google map integration is awful) and overall just want to make an internal app.
The cost of making an excellent flutter app is about the same you'd pay making fully native apps. Except that you're always paying for Skia's costs with Flutter.
This recommends 32GB to run _everything_, so xcode, gradle, emulators, simulators, etc. Not fully surprising.
Flutter doesn't use Skia anymore and you can absolutely bind to native libraries from Flutter with ease [0]. The current strategy (build hooks) is relatively new. You can also just write Kotlin or Swift for your application [1] using channel APIs. Finally, you can still have native pages in your app if needed for certain widgets [2] and still save time rewriting everything and all of your business logic for every single other page of the application that doesn't need those widgets. In fact, you can even mix native widgets and Flutter-rendered widgets in the same screen.
[0]: https://docs.flutter.dev/platform-integration/bind-native-co...
[1]: https://docs.flutter.dev/platform-integration/platform-chann...
[2]: https://docs.flutter.dev/add-to-app
And are comfortable making a 1-2 million dollar per devteam per year bet that Google won't rug pull you. And they seem to have no important or big app on it.
On an unrelated note, in 2024 Google did layoffs on the Flutter team.
https://shorebird.dev/blog/flutter-not-dead/
Also, the layoffs were for infrastructure engineers who were working on Flutter builds not actual core Flutter devs. And the layoff was just an offshoring, they moved the same jobs from the US to Europe.
Former Flutter Director, Shorebird founder here. Yes, that matches my understanding. The layoffs happened after I left Google, but yes Google appears to have simply off-shored the infrastructure (build and release) team.
That article answers a question nobody had while lying to conflate the poor answer with what people actually want to know.
The question isn't if Flutter is dead. It's (1) will Google continue to invest resources to maintain it (and note they could easily make their commitment firm, and have chosen not to do so for obvious reasons: they value the optionality to stop support); and (2) if Google were to reduce/end support, is there enough community, and by community we really mean companies with investments they can't walk away from, to take over maintenance and ongoing development to maintain it as an sdk that can target the evolving platforms.
So whether Whirlpool or Toyota use Flutter is entirely irrelevant. You can maintain in-car systems on private code, evidenced by how that was historically done. Toyota using this as their sdk for in-car whatever doesn't help someone whose problem is they need Flutter to work well on ios/android.
Whirlpool building an ecommerce app for Brazil... golf clap. Same as MGM's app. Small teams built those; small teams can build new ones. who cares.
Even citing the whirlpool app, which is (link followed) actually this:
https://flutter.dev/showcase/whirlpool
built by a small outsourced company makes clear how thin the support actually is. Suppose google drops support: how many ft engineers is Whirlpool going to pay to maintain Flutter as a first-class deploy target? I'd bet zero.
There's nobody like, just for example, Shopify with a multi-billion dollar commitment and a history of open source work who has an investment they're stuck with. or Facebook. Google's internal ads doesn't count: they already Angular'd people. They're perfectly capable of maintaining that as a one-off internal sdk.
They don't use it for gmail/maps. Or anything where the migration costs start with a B.
That sounds like the worst parts of native dev + PWAs combined
What?! Flutter is literally a game engine, its faster than native even on older phones and pretty much most of the issues you are talking about is old news lol