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    Eugene Saturow Head of Flutter

    Is Flutter Dead and Flock Taking Over After Google Layoffs: Answering the Most Common Concerns

    People talk about Flutter’s “death” so often it’s an every-year thing at this point. Now the talks are on again, and the most fuss revolves around the Flock-Flutter conflict and Google layoffs.

    We’ve dug into the most widespread Flutter-related fears and answered the main questions about Flock & Flutter with experts.

    Fear #1. Google is notorious for closing projects all of a sudden. Flutter’s the next one up

    Google does have this reputation for a reason. Many projects were closed, forcing customers to switch to alternatives. There’s even a whole Killed-by-Google graveyard. We don’t expect Flutter to appear on that list, and here’s why:

    1. Google often closes client projects, but much less often technological ones. The company has created and takes good care of TensorFlow and Kubernetes, two highly important infrastructure projects. K8s, for one, helps automate software deployment at CERN, IBM, OpenAI, and Wikimedia Foundation. Airbus, Intel, and Qualcomm use TensorFlow. Flutter is on par with these, too.
    2. Google eagerly uses it in its projects, too: for example, Google Ads and Google Earth.
    3. Flutter is far more popular than the technologies from Google’s graveyard in their pre-closure times. Let’s take a similar project that Google shut down: AngularDart. The company killed this framework a few years ago. Rumors about AngularDart dying intensified at the end of 2019 — back then its popularity was low and kept on falling. Google has redistributed resources from AngularDart to another project. That was Flutter Web.

      Take a look at both frameworks’ numbers:
    Contributions

    AngularDart in 2019 and Flutter now show very different trends. Flutter boasts stability: the number of commits has not decreased over the past few years. It was completely different with AngularDart.

    Hardly any big company used AngularDart in 2019 — I’ve only heard of Wrike. With trends like those, it would be an oversight to call the framework popular and its end unexpected.

    Eugene Saturow, Head of Flutter in Surf

    Wrike moved away from AngularDart when working with it became too hindersome. They mentioned that the framework had no growth, and no new features appeared for quite a while. We’ve talked to Wrike’s Ex-Director of Development about his experience with both frameworks. He sees no such red flags in Flutter that AngularDart had back then.

    Gradually, AngularDart lost popularity because it couldn’t bring anything new to the table except for supporting Dart. At the same time, Flutter is a completely different story. It didn’t start as a fork. It is a separate project offering something completely new, and a lot of experts are working on it. I don’t see any signs that Flutter is going down any time soon.

    Evgeny Kot, Flutter and Dart GDE

    We see many tech behemoths build their products with Flutter. And large companies would hardly invest in a technology a hair’s breadth away from death. Some of the most prominent Flutter users are BMW, Toyota, Virgin, Universal Studios, and Xiaomi.

    Move your app to the technology chosen by the best:\nmake it fast, stable, and consistent across all platforms.

    Discuss project

    But Google can still shut the project down; we won’t even see it coming

    Statistically, Google tends to kill projects when they reach the age of 4-5 years. Dart and Flutter have both already crossed this threshold, and the risk of sudden project death syndrome is now much lower.

    Project age when Google's most likely to kill it
    Based on the data from https://killedbygoogle.com/

    But even if Google lays off the entire Flutter team and cuts Flutter support, the project will remain open source. Flutter contributors are not related to each other in any way outside Flutter. They come from different companies all over the world. Even ex-Googlers who left the Flutter team on not-so-great terms continue to support Flutter — take Ian “Hixie” Hixon. This is not something you’d see with low-popularity projects.

    Also, you can run the entire development infrastructure on your hardware. This includes pub.dev, documentation, and the framework itself. That way, your Flutter project will live and prosper no matter what Google does.

    Fear #2. Google lays off the Flutter team. Soon there will be no one to support the framework

    The new wave of Flutter death panic has reverbed after the news about Google layoffs in early 2024. Many believe that Google will now move all resources from Flutter to other projects.

    Let’s keep it real: along with the Flutter team members, Google has laid off Python experts, Google Assistant employees, and people from the data protection team. Some of these positions are moved to India and Mexico. Instead of cutting these positions completely, Google seeks to optimize resources spent on them.

    Goes to show the company’s attitude to its employees, but let’s leave it aside for now. It is not the work on a project that is being cut, but the cost of human-hours. Google reduces costs and says bye to people, but many roles stay on the staff list.

    These layoffs were probably a consequence of super-active growth during the COVID-19 pandemic. In those years, Apple, Amazon, Meta, Google and other companies saw an uptick in demand for digital services and hired large numbers of employees to develop their products. But the pandemic ended and people went back to spending less time online again. Hence the attempts to reduce operating costs and optimize staffing levels in corporations.

    These cuts stem from the overall situation in the industry and in the economies of the countries where it is happening. It’s not because a particular technology is about to die.

    Eugene Saturow, Head of Flutter in Surf

    Let’s look at the numbers. Google doesn’t disclose how many cutbacks there were exactly and calls it “a few hundred.” Meanwhile, Amazon has announced 9,000 layoffs in 2024, Microsoft has cut more than 2,500 employees. Apple and Meta are also on this list — we don’t have the precise numbers, but Meta has cut at least 21,000 positions in the past two years. Against this background, the panic around Google layoffs no longer seems reasonable. But Google Trends shows that Google layoffs get more attention.

    Layoff search queries about Amazon, Microsoft, and Google

    Now, 182 Flutter team members have commit permission on GitHub, as Ian “Hixie” Hickson, co-founder of Flutter, outlined on his blog. It’s likely that a lot of these people aren’t Google employees.

    The size of the Flock team remains unknown. But we do know that Flock is 24 commits ahead and 423 behind the main framework branch, as of December 2024. With these stats, it’s unclear how the fork team plans to be better, work faster, and synchronize with the main Flutter branch at the same time.

    Fear #3. Prominent leaders quit with a scandal. Things are clearly not going well in Team Flutter

    This is the most valid worry. There’s always an uproar when founders and key figures of a project leave. This is strategically bad for the reputation of the technology because the project loses its “faces”, which many people follow and listen to.

    During 2022–2023, Google lost Flutter co-founders Eric Seidel, Tim Sneath, and Hixie. Most people quit jobs quietly and on seemingly friendly terms; Hixie left and named who he believed to be specific culprits for the problems — the team’s middle managers. But even in this context, he openly said that he plans to continue working on Flutter outside of Google.

    Engineers leaving is absolutely normal. So far, their announcements and departures have not affected Flutter’s development in any way. If you look at the Flutter’s popularity on Stack Overflow, you can see the growth stabilizing.

    Stack Overflow trends for Flutter, RN, and Cordova

    This shows the maturity of the framework: the community continues to ask questions, though be it less actively than in Flutter’s first years. Leveling out is a logical stage after a boom in popularity. There’s no sharp drawdowns, and that shows that the topic is still interesting to the framework’s users.

    Even if the entire Flutter team — all the contributors like Samsung, Microsoft and others — took a year off tomorrow, it would have absolutely no effect on the functionality of the framework.

    But when the key figures leave, it can negatively impact the framework in the long run. We’ll see what it causes in the future.

    Fear #4. The framework has accumulated so many problems and pull requests — the team can’t process them in a lifetime

    Flock creators call the fork a Flutter’s ally, not a competitor. But at the same time, they accuse the framework of being slow with request processing and error fixing. However, we don’t see it that way.

    We at Surf have contributed large packages to Flutter a few times. It always took quite some time, but it went problem-free, and our work always made it to the release. We’re overall satisfied with Flutter in its current state: widgets solve most “problems.” If Flutter has ignored your requests for a long time, please share your story with us: we will be glad to learn from your experience.

    Eugene Saturow, Head of Flutter in Surf

    It’s possible that Flutter issues hang for a long time without a solution. Open-source projects can’t work fast, and it’s normal. Framework co-founder Eric Seidel estimates that more than one million developers use Flutter every month. A community that big will inevitably generate thousands of requests. And this just indicates the framework’s liveliness: if people send requests, it means they use Flutter to create new solutions and support the already launched ones.

    By the end of 2024, we see 13,000 open tickets — a lifetime seems not enough to address them all. But many of them need no attention, and most of the rest describe non-critical problems. We’ve kept track of Flutter’s GitHub for a week: they merged 92 PRs and closed 186 issues, which is quite a lot.

    Plus, the Issues section includes not only engine and framework problems, but also problems of all official packages: for example, google_maps_flutter, Firebase, or go_router. They’re not directly related to Flutter. If we filter the issues by “Engine” and “P1” (first priority) tags, we see only 30 tickets. Some among those are indeed several years old, but they are mostly labeled “Proposal.”

    Issues often are more “nice to have” in nature: kind of like “it works, but not just the way I want.” They don’t block the releases or impact user experience negatively.

    Some requests are simply nonsense and shouldn’t exist at all. Take a proposal to add the Get X package to the Flutter Favorite list. The community considers this package harmful: there are a number of reasons why you shouldn’t use it.

    If the numbers still seem high, take a look at the completed stats: the team resolved 88,000 issues and merged 57,000 pull requests during the six years the Flutter has been around.

    Fear #5. Flutter isn’t evolving anymore

    Here’s a list of the most notable recent changes in Flutter.

    • Improved game support, including the Flame game engine. На Flutter в последнее время перевели некоторые Some highly popular mobile games have recently been ported to Flutter.
    • Flutter Add-to-App — a tool that allows you to use Flutter to write separate screens, modal windows, widgets, and then embed them into an existing Android or iOS application.
    • Better web support. Progressive web apps in Flutter are lightweight, fast, and work the same across platforms. Flutter Web provides hot restart that allows developers to see changes without relaunching the app — like the mobile’s hot reload.
    • Impeller, a new graphics engine to replace SKIA. Among other things, it makes it easier and faster to work with 3D graphics. While Kotlin Multiplatform is just on its way to master SKIA, Flutter is already moving away from it.
    • Flutter GPU, an API for working with shaders.
    • Gemini AI integration.

    Plus Flutter wins against some of its competitors on performance metrics. While React Native just announced it supports up to 60 fps in beta, Flutter has long supported 120 fps.

    Flutter runs on Android, iOS, iPadOS, Web, Windows, macOS, and Linux. The framework officially and unofficially offers embeddings for embedded systems of TVs, wearable electronics, smart speakers, cars, and terminals. The community has created many forks for different systems:

    • Tizen — an operating system for Samsung home electronics.
    • Raspberry Pi — a single-board computer.
    • Sony eLinux — Embedded Linux for Sony electronics.
    • Apple TV — Apple digital media player.

    Fear #6: Flutter is losing popularity

    Let’s compare the activity and popularity of similar UI frameworks. Take a look at the stars and forks of Flutter, React Native, and Compose Multiplatform on GitHub:

    Flutter outperforms its rivals on both counts. Since 2020, Flutter’s rating has gone from 99,000 stars to 168,000.

    On top of that, we see 34,934 packages on pub.dev. Nearly a thousand of them appeared in December 2024. React Native has 1,643 packages.

    Flutter, RN, Cordova, Ionic, Xamarin_ Popularity compared
    According to https://www.statista.com/statistics/869224/worldwide-software-developer-working-hours/

    Only Flutter showed growth in popularity until 2023.

    Yes, Flutter’s development speed has slowed down a bit, but you can hardly expect a mature framework to have the same commit rate as a young one. It only means that it has already occupied its niche.

    Evgeny Kot, Flutter and Dart GDE

    What companies use Flutter

    Big players from different industries have built their apps with Flutter:

    1. BMW left native for Flutter due to inconsistencies in versions for different OSs.
    2. Nokia developed the Here WeGo mapping app for 10 million users.
    3. Microsoft launched Flutter support for foldable tablets and contributed to Flutter.
    4. Ubuntu made Flutter the main framework for apps on their OS.

    If Google suddenly stops supporting Flutter, large companies will be happy to take charge of such a project. Lia Jarrett, ex-PM of the Flutter team at Google, says that, too. She mentions that FlutterFlow, her current team, is also ready to further develop Flutter if Google abandons it. And that’s another reason why Google is unlikely to drop Flutter: they have no reason to give away a project they’ve invested so much in.

    Fear #7. Flock appeared — where there’s smoke, there’s fire. Flutter’s got problems

    It must be simple reasoning at work: developers came up with an alternative — so Flutter didn’t give them what they wanted.

    Usually, it does work like that. Flutter forks solve different problems: some, for example, add support for platforms that official Flutter doesn’t support. These include Tizen, Raspberry Pi, Sony eLinux, and Apple TV, which we’ve mentioned above.

    New forks appear regularly — there are now 27,900 of them. But none of them claim to do “the same thing as Flutter, only better.” And Flock offers the vague concept of “better”: faster problem solving, minimized bureaucracy. The creators do not explain exactly how and at the expense of what.

    Let’s get back to Flutter statistics: over the six years of its existence, the team closed 88,000 issues and 58,000 PRs. It is possible to reduce the “bureaucracy” of making changes only if there are very few of them: that is if no one uses the fork. This means that Flock can only achieve its goals if it doesn’t take off.

    Why Flock caused a stir in the first place

    Matt Carroll, one of the Flock’s creators, announced the fork at the Flutter Silicon Valley Meetup on October 24. A few days prior, the fork’s creator released a series of posts explaining his decision. This further revved up traditional expectations of Flutter’s demise.

    So far, the project hasn’t been getting lots of likes on GitHub: ten weeks after the announcement, the fork has gained 131 stars. Four people are also watching it.

    Flock

    With this in mind, the Flock/Flutter fuss seems overhyped, to say the least.

    Everyone is waiting for negative news. With this background, a fork a bit more noticeable than average causes a surge in discussions. Allegedly, “the right” Flutter has appeared, and the old one is dying. But so far they have nothing but an announcement — there is nothing to discuss.

    Eugene Saturow, Head of Flutter in Surf

    What to expect from Flock

    The whole fuss around Flock looks like the result of purposeful PR. The creators have posted a lot on different platforms, and people have spread them around. But there is almost no actual work behind these actions.

    A month after Flock’s announcement, the activity in the organization on GitHub remains low, with a dozen commits total in all the forked repositories. Maybe this will change in the future, but for now the activity around Flock is less noticeable than announced.

    So far, it seems that the authors of the fork aren’t solving problems faster than Flutter, but are trying to shift the vector of efforts to the problems that they find relevant. What will come out of this is yet to be seen.

    Flock - comment on Reddit
    r/flutterdev users also look unimpressed

    Bottom line: Flutter’s alive and kicking, and here’s why

    Experts point out the following signs that Flutter is doing great: