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Hixie | 3 years ago
Oh I'm sure plenty of that happens, but that's true of all SDKs. Plenty of people do that with Android Views, plenty of people do that with Swift UI, etc. I have no reason to believe that Flutter is particularly different from the others in terms of the proportion of apps of this kind.
> Totally agree, it seemed more to me people were hired for this vs expanding elsewhere.
Ah, no. We've hired more engineers for iOS work in the past few months, but the games toolkit was mostly devrel and a contractor, if I recall correctly. Similarly for things like the pinball demo or the Wonderous app, those are primarily done by contracting an agency rather than people on the Flutter team, with the agency's feedback directly feeding into the engineering team's priorities. So for example, Wonderous was great because during its development it helped us find a whole bunch of issues we needed to fix.
> after I wrote this I was sent links to other people on twitter lamenting the same growth into other sectors while mobile was not polished
Again, the various areas aren't comparable or exchangeable. For example, Canonical is contributing to the Linux port, but it's not like Canonical would ever contribute to the iOS port, after all, their interest is in using Flutter on Ubuntu. Similarly, people Google hires to work on the iOS port are typically not the kind of people who want to work on Android or Windows, and so on. There's lots of areas of specialization, and if you task people to work on areas they're not experts on and not interested in, you're just going to burn them out and get low-quality work.
Even if people were commodities and interchangeable, though, I don't think it makes sense to focus on one area at the exclusion of another. There is more value in Flutter being able to target seven platforms (Android, iOS, Windows, macOS, Linux, web, and Fuchsia) well, than there would be in targeting just one platform completely perfectly. Especially because the effort to get from zero to excellent is much less than the effort required to get from excellent to perfect. Flutter is not unique in this. Kotlin isn't perfect on Android, but that doesn't mean JetBrains should avoid working on web support. C++ isn't perfect on AT&T Unix, but that doesn't mean people shouldn't implement it on other platforms. HTML isn't perfect for documents, but that doesn't mean we should not have extended it to applications. My house's kitchen isn't perfect, but I still want a bedroom.
> I have my opinion that the base is people who deal with the language / framework on a nearly weekly basis
By that definition, I am not a programmer, because there's literally no language that I use every week. Indeed, there are entire weeks where I don't write any code at all!
> https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/110431
Looks like Chris is working on that one. (By the way, that issue was filed by a Flutter team member, so presumably that answers your question about whether the Flutter team notices iOS issues.) (Also, that issue is a good example of the tools that we use to test this stuff.)
nhannah|3 years ago
I was just trying to understand adoption rate which I believe correlates to longevity
> Again, the various areas aren't comparable or exchangeable. > My house's kitchen isn't perfect, but I still want a bedroom.
I totally get this viewpoint, I think perception can be different from the outside.
> By that definition, I am not a programmer, because there's literally no language that I use every week.
Head back to IC ;)
> By the way, that issue was filed by a Flutter team member, so presumably that answers your question about whether the Flutter team notices iOS issues.
Need to take issue here, this was talked exhaustively about in a thread on reddit where a dev was leaving Flutter because of user complaints on this issue, the thread was seen by a team member then and taken up.