Flutter: Is the future or dead?
Recently Google pulled the plug on Stadia, its cloud-based gaming service. This leads us to think, will Flutter receive the same fate, or is it different?
Now I can directly tell you that the lead PM/UX for Flutter/Dart, recently wrote this in response to the above arguments.
"we're not shutting Flutter down"
Google wouldn't be better off if we had to throw all that code away and start over.
But this tells us nothing. This just tells us the fact that currently, Flutter is not in a state like Stadia was, but can it be?
For this, we need to understand how Stadia started and how it finally met its demise.
Chapter 1: Stadia — Google’s game changer?
In the starting 30 secs of the video above, the narrator states that Google aimed to provide no lag no latency, and 4k game streaming, where you can play any game, anywhere. This concept can be understood as the internet-based version of Steam Link, in which you don’t need to have a PC to run games. Now overall the concept was pretty good, as I use this myself but with Xbox Cloud Gaming.
Google spent millions and millions of dollars into making Stadia a real thing and having both developers and gamers port their way onto it. But still, they missed out on targets by hundreds of thousands. Why?
Now if you watch the above video from 3:02, the narrator states that one needs at least 25mbps internet network connection to play games at 1080p 60FPS. Yeah, so many countries don’t have such internet infrastructure (source), and therefore even basic 1080p game streaming was not possible.
Don’t get me wrong, bigger markets such as the USA, and the UK have such infrastructure, and game streaming is getting picked up there as well, but they had another issue with Google Stadia. See in Stadia, one had to pay a subscription to play selected titles, and once you stop paying, the games are also taken away from you, unlike what happens in say Steam or any other store like Epic or Xbox. So you only have access to limited games, and you even have to pay for games that you already own, and they will not be yours forever and taken away once you stop paying.
Like if you just want to play My Little Pony, then you would have to buy the stadia Pro membership which is $10 per month, and you get to keep the game until you pay for the game.
And for that price, you can get the game for a lifetime if you just head over to Steam. So it didn’t make any sense for most games.
So yeah not many people onboarded the Stadia train. (Watch the above video from 7:41)
Now that we know how Google started Stadia, and why it met its demise, we can move on to Flutter.
Chapter 2: Flutter, flutter and flutter
Again we need to know why Flutter was started, and how it is doing currently to answer the question of whether is Flutter the future or dead.
So Flutter started with a mission to provide a single codebase for apps on Android, iOS, web & desktop. It is a portable UI Kit, which is free and open-source and is used by developers and organizations around the world. One such organization is Google which uses Flutter for its apps such as Google Pay (source).
Now over the years, StackOverflow conducts a yearly survey that has many insights into the life of developers around the world. Now following that we can see that only 3.7% of the developers liked Dart in the year 2020, which grew up to 6.02% in 2021, and 6.54% in 2022. Now, this might not look big, but it is significant information, as due to the nature of Flutter being used in conjunction with the native language such as Kotlin, Swift, or JavaScript, these people are selecting Dart over these languages. We can see that Swift is declining each year by 1%, while Kotlin grows by around 0.5% each year. This makes us think Why Flutter is the most popular cross-platform mobile SDK — Stack Overflow Blog?
Now, this percentage of StackOverflow questions shows the general developer’s interest in the corresponding framework, and we can see that number of questions in Flutter is growing way faster than the number of React Native questions.
And quoting this article,
After an explosive rise in usage over the past three years, Flutter’s market share is beginning to plateau.
In the same surveys, it is constantly shown that Dart is the lowest-paying language, and even I can vouch for the fact that I would earn more if I code in Swift rather than Dart. It would also make my code much more important, as less number of people are available for Swift than Dart, and I don’t think Apple is switching to any other language any soon.
So is this the beginning of the end?
Chapter 3: await Future.delayed(Flutter);
The very next line in the above blog states that,
But developers should not look at this as a sign that Flutter is going away anytime soon.
New developers are puzzled by the question that what they should pick, React Native or Flutter? When they come to such surveys, they see that React has a bigger community (JavaScript), it has more stable tutorials, and courses, as it has been in the game for longer, it also pays more, and the jobs are readily available.
In contrast to this, most of the dubs Flutter has, are in the favour of the product, like the prototype can be made much faster, it would have better-looking UI and animations, and overall it is much easier to understand and code.
So this would point to the declining interest in Flutter, but there isn’t any declining interest. As mentioned by Tim Sneath,
Over 600,000 apps in the Play Store alone are already written using Flutter, to say nothing of the countless apps for iOS, Windows, macOS, Linux and web. The list includes big brands like Alibaba, BMW, eBay, and SHEIN. Neither Google as a whole, nor Android in particular would be better off if Flutter didn’t continue to flourish.
Over 600,000 apps have already been built using Flutter.
Also, there is one more fact in support of Flutter compared to Stadia. It is open-source which means any developer can contribute to it, and it is not dependent on Google for functioning, even though currently they are the ones who maintain it. As in the case of many open-source projects, when one maintainer leaves, another one joins, and the legacy of such projects is carried on. There are many prominent developers such as Remi, who have worked on many prominent plugins and packages for Flutter, and have even contributed to the Flutter engine code itself.
And due to the marketing efforts of Google, many big companies such as Samsung, Microsoft, Canonical (Organisation behind Ubuntu), and Sony have already started working with Flutter, i.e. developing their own cross-platform apps in it which further seals the deal. Also unlike Stadia or any other thing which has died, Flutter is not dependent on anything exclusive which is not available to the majority of people. It is available to everyone, for free, and they can run it on anything ranging from a potato PC or simple Android phone to even the best in class Mac Studio they can wish of.
Final Boss: Conclusion
There are many problems with Flutter, and in general how the Flutter team works, as pointed out in this comment, but the fact of the matter is that it is not going anywhere, and is constantly growing, despite these. So I can firmly say that Flutter is the future, and is nowhere close to being dead it is just started to feel more alive than ever before.
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Thanks for reading, and Happy Fluttering!
