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nhannah | 3 years ago
Strategy:
> We primarily build for external-to-Google users, but Google adoption of Flutter remains of great value to us, as it helps us “pay our bills”
So grow or die as Google adoption is heading in a negative direction now and you are racing to grow enough to offset no one new eating the dog food?
> our primary strategic objective is the growth of monthly active users
> On the other hand, even a mediocre SDK will have a healthy and flourishing ecosystem if it is used by the plurality of developers.
Don't create something people love and use internally then share it with the world with mostly permanent internal funding, but instead get enough external buy-in that Google keeps it alive via inertia? My questions above were very much about this, does Flutter have that inertia in hard numbers or are you racing a clock now that internal buy-in is seemingly diminishing? Based on this you must have a MAU target, how far off is it, could you share even a percentage? If you don't hit it will the project be axed right away or is there a runway?
> Other characteristics (runtime performance, memory usage, etc.) will earn the respect of a developer: important, for sure. But developer experience will earn love.
This is only true until they realize the devils bargain you are mentioning above, I was complaining about expansion via game dev over polishing iOS in my previous post, this seems to be the planned strategy, which is very disheartening.
> In 2022 we will make good on this promise, and further raise our quality on web and desktop. We believe Flutter's growth will increasingly come from web and desktop: ecosystems that each have many millions of developers.
> Yet the web developer market is huge (10m+) and Flutter offers something distinctive for this audience
In a world where polish is not priority I think Flutter best fits on desktop, kudos there...web for flutter is very niche as noted, I guess if expansion is all that's important that's cool, but I would take iOS polish over web any day, I just don't see business apps using Flutter for web, it really only makes sense to me for apps that would be looking toward canvas, etc. anyway.
Roadmap:
> We will update the Material library to support Material 3.
iOS once again super low priority :(
> We plan to continue to evolve the language at a deliberately slow but steady pace.
This is how churn will happen, you have buy in from many people and they are clamoring for improvements, custom linting, sick of codegen, better inference, faster analysis in large repos, etc., but this is lower priority than gaming and material design updates.
> In 2021 we resolved a number of issues around jank ... As a result, we have been rewriting our graphics backend. In 2022
Out of everything I read only this last piece on jank felt like something I need as a current Flutter developer on mobile; thank you.
I have felt for a while the developer experience was too focused on easy entry / getting started and not professional work, this seemingly is the goal. The r/FlutterDev thread on the stadia shutdown has lots of users saying "Flutter is not Stadia", but it sounds like it is. Flutter is not an OSS framework like React that is supported by Meta because they use it heavily, this is a product, you need customers, Flutter has targets that can be missed just like Stadia. This is extremely worrisome. The same MSFT employee who asked you about MAU mentioned the large DevRel spend on Flutter vs the zero spend on the main competitor. I thought at the time this was to push more people toward Android first multi-platform (I would say the competitor is iOS first), turns out that was a misread. This also explains why MAU numbers are not shared, that's not a nice metric of an OSS community like other OSS frameworks have, that is a business metric.
Unless there is more hard number / metric / goal transparency I don't think you can really say there is no reason to be worried.
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