> sadly, trying to work with the Flutter team delivers a different reality. While some developers have had success working with the Flutter team, many other developers have found it frustrating, if not unworkable.
This is what's wrong with companies trying to do OSS. They are literally unable to get over themselves and tap into the one quality that makes OSS so worthwhile: tapping into third parties volunteering their time, creativity, and ideas. The need to tightly control direction and strategy of a project leads to companies putting up walls that make it hard to tap into this.
IMHO, Google made several mistakes with Flutter that stem from their "not invented here syndrome". Effectively they've been competing with their own people on things like Kotlin, Kotlin multiplatform, and now Compose Multiplatform which is emerging as a direct competitor to flutter (does the same things on the same platforms). The obvious move years ago would have been to open up the flutter platform to other languages than Dart (especially Kotlin) and share code across both ecosystems and make the combined solution a better one.
That never happened. Dart is alright but in the end it's just another Java/Kotlin like language. IMHO Kotlin is nicer. But that's just me. Interoperability between Swift and Kotlin native now exists on IOS. Compose works on IOS. But Dart-Kotlin interoperability is not a thing.
This is not some kind of oversight. This is so obvious that it must have been proposed, multiple times, and blocked by Google management for internal political reasons. I have no other explanation. Any technical blocking issues would have been fixable/addressable. They chose not to. And now Flutter is de-prioritized internally and the team reduced in size because Google created another dead end. This is self inflicted failure. It took an outside team from Jetbrains to take Jetpack Compose and turn it into the multi-platform solution it is now becoming.
A foundation with a fork is the right move. Fix the above and great stuff might happen. Google doing things alone isn't working for them. Repeatedly. They need outside help. It's there for the taking. They should not fight this foundation but back it with money and transfer the entire flutter team to it.
This is what's wrong with companies trying to do OSS. They are literally unable to get over themselves and tap into the one quality that makes OSS so worthwhile: tapping into third parties volunteering their time, creativity, and ideas. The need to tightly control direction and strategy of a project leads to companies putting up walls that make it hard to tap into this.
IMHO, Google made several mistakes with Flutter that stem from their "not invented here syndrome". Effectively they've been competing with their own people on things like Kotlin, Kotlin multiplatform, and now Compose Multiplatform which is emerging as a direct competitor to flutter (does the same things on the same platforms). The obvious move years ago would have been to open up the flutter platform to other languages than Dart (especially Kotlin) and share code across both ecosystems and make the combined solution a better one.
That never happened. Dart is alright but in the end it's just another Java/Kotlin like language. IMHO Kotlin is nicer. But that's just me. Interoperability between Swift and Kotlin native now exists on IOS. Compose works on IOS. But Dart-Kotlin interoperability is not a thing.
This is not some kind of oversight. This is so obvious that it must have been proposed, multiple times, and blocked by Google management for internal political reasons. I have no other explanation. Any technical blocking issues would have been fixable/addressable. They chose not to. And now Flutter is de-prioritized internally and the team reduced in size because Google created another dead end. This is self inflicted failure. It took an outside team from Jetbrains to take Jetpack Compose and turn it into the multi-platform solution it is now becoming.
A foundation with a fork is the right move. Fix the above and great stuff might happen. Google doing things alone isn't working for them. Repeatedly. They need outside help. It's there for the taking. They should not fight this foundation but back it with money and transfer the entire flutter team to it.