What’s Next for Flutter After Layoffs Hit Google Team
Google’s Flutter team was among those cut during the company’s May layoffs, a situation that has left developers wondering where the project stands. Is it worth learning or using the cross-platform open source framework for UI?
A Flutter and Firebase developer who goes by the name xeladu wrote that after a discussion with an unnamed “Google developer expert,” the developer wouldn’t recommend learning the language, but added it’s not time to port Flutter projects just yet.
“I’d rather say no to be totally honest. Only do it if you just want to play around. Then it will be fine,” xeladu wrote. “But becoming a serious professional Flutter developer could probably be a waste of time.”
“Google itself gets a ton of value from Flutter. Google’s leadership sees big value in Flutter’s strong adoption and love by its users.”
– Flutter Product Manager Seth Ladd
After seeing similar comments questioning the viability of Flutter, we reached out to Google for more information.
Google declined to provide details on the extent of the Flutter team layoffs. However, when asked how Google’s Flutter team would respond to developers who have concerns over the product’s future, Flutter Product Manager and web engineer Seth Ladd described an aggressive roadmap for Flutter, as well as a growing ecosystem. He also highlighted the importance of Flutter within Google itself, noting that there have been “real productivity wins for Google teams launching their apps” on Flutter.
For instance, Google Earth used Flutter to simultaneously launch the same features and obtain feature parity across different platforms once they adopted Flutter, he said.
“I want to point out that Flutter is used by many Google teams for their apps such as Google Earth and Classrooms,” Ladd said. “Google itself gets a ton of value from Flutter. Google’s leadership sees big value in Flutter’s strong adoption and love by its users. At the Google I/O developer keynote, when we mentioned Flutter, you could just feel the uproar of support from the crowd.”
The Kotlin Recommendation
One point xeladu cited as a possible warning sign is that Google recommends JetBrain’s Kotlin language over Flutter when developers want deep interoperability with the hardware and the Android platform.
Ladd confirmed that is the case, pointing to a blog post on the topic, which notes that this recommendation goes back to Google I/O 2019. But Ladd added that Flutter is Google’s recommended software development kit (SDK) for when developers want to share business logic and user interface (UI) code across all platforms to deliver a consistent user experience.
A Growing Ecosystem
Ladd also pointed to momentum in the Flutter ecosystem, noting that there’s over a million active developers using Flutter and over a million apps in the App Store and Google Play stores. He added that companies of all sizes, from one-person startups to established brands, have adopted Flutter.
Geico, for instance, recently posted about its use of Flutter on their development blog, he pointed out.
Screenshot via Geico’s Developer blog.
“Not only were they able to discover that ability to write code once and deploy to multiple platforms, they were able to create a single set of best practices across mobile and web, and standardize their branding across their different delivery channels,” Ladd said.
Virgin Money also used Flutter to streamline their collaborations between quality assurance, UX and development, he added. Companies have also said Flutter lets them bring something to market faster than before Flutter.
“Universal is a really good example here,” he said. “In their case study, they told us they had 44% shorter release cycles once they adopted Flutter, which is really awesome to see.”
“We’re bridging the gaps between designers, developers and users.”
– Ladd
There are also businesses starting to build around Flutter, which is growing the ecosystem. Specifically, he mentioned:
- FlutterFlow is a visual development platform built on Flutter that produces apps running on Flutter. Flutter Flow has more than 1.4 million users now, he said.
- Shorebird is a code push service that enables Flutter apps to get updates and patches quickly. It has thousands of users and has pushed many millions of patches a month out, Ladd said.
- Very Good Ventures is one of the first professional services companies built around and initially for Flutter itself, he said. Very Good Ventures helps teams like real estate company Keller Williams, the hit musical Hamilton, Toyota and online investment company Betterment build Flutter, he added.
“We’re bridging the gaps between designers, developers and users,” Ladd said. “We’re seeing startups like Shorebird, which builds out technical capabilities for how you can bring your Flutter app to users, professional service companies like Very Good Ventures, all spawn out of their success with Flutter. So that’s just so amazing to see.”
Flutter’s Roadmap
The Flutter team also is moving ahead on its roadmap, which is available on its GitHub project, he said. Ladd outlined the team’s long list of planned projects, including:
- Performance improvements, building off the success of its new rendering engine, Impeller. Impeller has already been used for iOS, and will next be used for Android. That will help performance around scrolling, animation and other graphical heavy workloads, Ladd said.
- Reducing jank in Flutter Web. ”For example, we’re improving image decoding so you’ll get much less jank as we have a better way to do those image decoding for you,” he said.
- Building off the announcement of Wasm support from Google I/O. “What’s next there is, we’re converting our packages to be Wasm compatible, and we’ll be working with the ecosystem to help their packages become Wasm-compatible,” he added. Wasm will let developers get closer to the hardware, which improves performance and expands the possibilities the Dart language can bring natively to the browser experience, he said.
- Improving fidelity by investing heavily in its Cupertino widget library, which is a set of toggles, controls and switches that have an iOS look and feel. This will help ensure Flutter apps deliver an excellent iOS platform feel and fidelity for users, he said.
- Helping developers take advantage of what the platform offers in terms of integrations and features. That will include adopting the Swift package manager, he added. “This will help teams using Flutter fit even better into the iOS ecosystem,” he said. “We’re also improving the Flutter developer experience when writing code that talks directly to the underlying platform and talking to the platform APIs themselves.”
- Improving the ability to add Flutter Web into an existing web app, so companies with existing web app investments can add Flutter Web for parts of their apps.
- Improving accessibility in Flutter Web. “For example, we’re going to do this by using more semantically rich nodes in the accessibility tree, and this is just us fitting even better with the web platform to improve the accessibility features via Flutter Web,” he said.
- Integrating with the broader Google ecosystem, he said. For example, there are plans to further integrate Flutter into IDX, which is Google’s web-based IDE.
- Bringing Google’s generative AI tools and features into the platforms Flutter supports. Some AI features are already available today with Flutter, including the Gemini API. “We see a lot of exciting opportunities there for devs to build those Gen AI powered apps with flutter, and of course, bring them to all users across all platforms,” Ladd said.
Another big theme for Flutter moving forward will be platform interoperability, he added.
“It’s really important to us that teams using Flutter can take full advantage of all the amazing features that each platform has to offer,” he said.
Monetization on Flutter
Finally, the team plans to support the monetization of Flutter so that others can build successful businesses with Flutter.
“We’re improving our support for deep linking, which is the ability, for example, to build an ad, have the ad — when someone clicks the ad — jump directly into a specific point in their app, which, of course, helps with the ad, then app, then conversion scenarios,” he said. “One thing we’re doing to help there is offering deep link validation tools so that app devs and the teams that own those apps can increase their confidence that those sort of ad app conversion scenarios is really going to hit.”
The team also plans to provide developers with more ad formats to monetize, like video and audio ads, he said.
All of which makes Flutter a good bet, he added.
“We’re seeing secondary and tertiary businesses and contributions to the Flutter ecosystem,” Ladd said. “It’s a very strong position that we’re in, and it’s a very safe bet to take.”
Editor’s note: The article was updated July 18 to link to the correct blog post Seth Ladd referenced.
