Flutter, Google’s cross-platform developer framework, is being forked. Former Google employee Matt Carroll, however, wants to accelerate its development within the immensely depleted Flutter project, not build an alternative.
Carroll describes the problems surrounding Flutter as follows: a team of roughly 50 people within Google needs to produce a project for about 1 million developers, but is unable to do so. These are figures that Carroll admits are estimates, owing to the fact Google does not share them. Due to several rounds of layoffs at Google, the Flutter team is severely depleted and, according to the developer, difficult to communicate with. It also welcomes contributions to the open-source project but rarely makes use of them.
Flutter fork is primarily a catalyst
Actually, Flutter is not really being forked, Carroll argues. Instead, Flock is intended as a “Flutter+” to advance certain critical changes and innovations. Also, Flock is intended to break the “communication monoculture” where Google employees would make strange demands to discuss problems. In particular, a supposed lack of focus on desktop applications, an extension of Flutter’s traditionally mobile mindset, is an ailment that Flock aims to solve.
Google has made rounds of layoffs within several teams this year. These were said to include virtually the entire Python team, as well as developers from the Flutter and Dart teams. Since this took place just before Google I/O, the company’s annual developer conference, this was a pretty disastrous blow to the community surrounding Google’s open-source projects.
Instead, the tech giant’s focus is elsewhere: on AI. More than a quarter of the programming code within Google’s new projects has been crafted by generative AI, Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai stated this week. Besides the impressive growth of all kinds of Google departments, the story around the company is an overwhelmingly positive one for analysts and shareholders. Dissatisfaction with rounds of layoffs, however, will bubble around for a long time to come.
Reaction negative
It is difficult to determine exactly how Flutter users feel about 1) the platform and 2) a fork, besides the fact that there are thus no official figures on actual usage or the size of the development team. But as a rough gauge, the initial reaction to the fork on Reddit is quite negative. Users talk about “a complete waste of time,” suggest an underestimation of Google’s Flutter work and question Carroll’s figures. “Flutter is here to stay,” said one user.
Also read: Google is putting AI to work: 25% of new code is AI-generated