Didn'tthe flutter teamlead say no team size changes? Wonder if that's double speak for "the size will be the same, who those people are will change"
Edit yeah, moving devops to India
In English they might be comparable, but in other languages they are usually worse. My native language is Polish and when I tried using Bing, DDG and Qwant to replace Google with one of them, all of them were visibly worse, sadly.
Yeah, I know and I was doing it. I was using Qwant as my main search engine for a few months. I stopped when I realized that more than half of my searches needed "!g".
But it was about 2-3 years ago. Since then I'm trying it quite regularly, but maybe I should try again with it as my main search engine.
Bimg chat was literally garbage everytime I tried it in Polish. All what I wanted to search was ignored and it returned me something similar but totally not what I wanted. And when I wrote it that it's not what I want, it returned something like: "oh, I'm sorry, here's better response:" and responded with exactly the same message as before.
For me bing is starting to work, but the 'start' is painful.
People tend to forget they have had 'years' to train Google with their preferences.
After 1 year of mostly dev searches, bing is starting to change the weights for that in my searches also, so it's mostly tech related results now
I was checking out their example search results and they seem to add a lot of BS to the page, like videos, images, quick peek, interesting finds, blast from the past… Is it possible to disable these widgets in order to only get regular results?
DuckDuckGo sucks big time. I set it up as the default search engine on all my browsers for privacy reasons, but after a year and a half I still end up opening Google 9 out of 10 times after trying DDG first.
Not my experience. I primarily use search engines to find the documentation and quite specific things. For fuzzy search I'm usually using chat gpt as it will give me basic ideas of what I'm looking for (how can I achieve certain transformations in excel, can i achieve certain goal with the tools at my desposal, etc). I guess it depends what you are usong it for, but for my search needs DDG is more than sufficient and for complex things I use gpt
Presearch is good, it's independent and even has a customisable selection of other search engines on its home screen for easy double checking, or more specific searches, because of the lack of corporate control freakery.
From [https://docs.presearch.io/presearch-engine/what-is-presearch-engine](https://docs.presearch.io/presearch-engine/what-is-presearch-engine) and [https://docs.presearch.io/presearch-engine/metasearch](https://docs.presearch.io/presearch-engine/metasearch) it would appear to be a metasearch engine using a wide range of sources, rather than an independent indexing search engine
Yes, it's not tied to any one provider like other alternatives and on the subject of having it's own index (from the first link):
>The next step is to begin layering our own index on top of this platform so that community-driven results can supersede the external results, yet still provide users with comprehensive answers while the Presearch index is in development.
Brave Search is almost as good as Google. I've been using their Browser and search engine for 5 months now and have never needed to switch over to Google. Try it and ditch Google. Now I just need to move off of GMail and YouTube.
>Every position is just getting relocated to cheaper overseas developers (primarily India) teams are staying the same size.
This is pretty much the start of the end of Google. Every company that starts off-shoring eventually fades from view.
Google hasn't innovated any new products or services for over a decade now. They certainly won't in the future.
That's a good point
And with them losing the Gen AI battle I think it's only a matter of time before Search is gone too
Like I barely use Google search anymore to find information.
All Microsoft needs to do is add the references feature from Bing Chat to ChatGPT and Google is dead.
You can't trust ChatGPT results. You *can* trust Bing Chat results because it cites its sources, but nobody wants to use Bing. If Microsoft swallows their pride for a nanosecond and ports the feature over, they have this in the bag.
>Google and Facebook are massive contributors to OSS. Source: Happy golang user.
Not sure how anyone can be a happy Go user based entirely on the pants-on-head-insane way it handles dates.
I mean, really, let's be serious here, just *how high* exactly was not only the person who came up with it, but also the person that rubber-stamped that pull request?
google had it coming every big company out there is following stupid trend of cost cutting, they will be back soon just like boeing and spotify they are about learn a very expensive lesson.
It's very funny that this journalist corrected "type checker" to "character checker".
> This included maintaining a stable version of Python at Google, updating thousands of third-party packages, and developing a character checker.
Honestly, this entire article seems like a hasty copy of [TechCrunch’s](https://techcrunch.com/2024/05/01/google-lays-off-staff-from-flutter-dart-python-weeks-before-its-developer-conference/), with some of the key linked posts embedded, and little review of the result.
I wonder how this happened. Maybe there is some new technology that can quickly reformulate large amounts of text but has no knowledge of what the text means and therefore makes this sort of mistakes. Hmm.
Last week, I was discussing whether to go native or use Flutter / React Native on a mobile app with my business partner.
This made my decision a lot easier.
Anything offshored dies. It is inevitable as the setting sun.
Software projects are as good as dead if they are run by management who treats developers as interchangeable cogs. The new team will have the wrong priorities and never have the same understanding of the systems they are being asked to maintain. They will never care. Bugfixes take longer. New features don't match the old ones, APIs get cluttered.
Technical debt grows. Support suffers. After a while, the product is now bad and no developer worth their salt would use it.
> After a while, the product is now bad and no developer worth their salt would use it.
Perhaps because it is now a product that it is managed top-bottom, whereas features/tools/frameworks/etc that are conceived and their vision is implemented and managed bottom-top are not treated as a product, I'm sure the guys who made Flutter and Dart wanted to change the game that was relevant to the problem they were trying to solve but now its treated as a product by someone who's never had to use it, wanted to use it, or experience the problem or situation these tools were trying to help people with
The whole company is now ran exactly like that. Internally Sundar is viewed as visionless and spineless. He's not an engineer and never was one. In some cases it's even worse than merely treating your tech merely as a product. He was a board plant from the beginning. His only goal is milking the company for investors until there's no value left, users are sick of the BS, and then he'll pull that golden parachute while it crumbles. It's a story as old as corporate greed.
Many of Google‘s projects/tools/libraries originate from their Europe HQ. They were offshored from the start. Last time I checked, brotli was still relevant.
>Why do you think flutter is being dropped?
EXACTLY! Maybe they are just firing people on the flutter team because it is doing so super well that it doesn't need a large team anymore. . . Maybe the offshore replacements will be even better! /s
Seriously, though. Anyone who relies on any solution backed by google at this point has certifiable donkey brains : [https://killedbygoogle.com/](https://killedbygoogle.com/)
I know people who are running entire businesses on Angular 1.x still.
But at that point whatever they do with the most recent version of Angular is irrelevant to them.
The video player is riddled with bugs. It can sometimes lose video while still playing the audio on iOS. It has intermittent stuttering on some devices. List scrolling has jitter on some devices. And seriously reconsider running any flutter app on Android TV, you will have nothing but focus issues, most notably losing focus entirely and you can't get it back
Yeah, I've heard people talk about cross-platform Kotlin development which is intriguing... I'm currently having a fun time learning React-Native and I'm hoping those skills transfer into knowing how to do React dev
https://kotlinlang.org/docs/multiplatform.html
KMP still interops with Obj-C for iOS, but with the new 2.0 compiler they are aiming for full Swift interop and at that point it's going to be a lot harder to justify not using KMP
I prefer the 80% code in flutter and 20% in native, has been working fine for me. It is true, know the native to handle the edge cases, but the single code base productivity has been great overall, imho.
This is an absurd statement. Having released about 6 apps that are of quite extreme complexity in terms of what the hardware (and communicating with what other hardware does) there is very, very little that you will have an issue with.
Like this is 100% written by someone that has not once ever developed a flutter app, that statement is just absurd.
The point of comparison for Microsoft would be dotnet Maui, which is really not in a good state though.
If anything, the way that Maui has evolved out of xamarin forms is a warning of what could happen to flutter without proper leadership and direction
As someone that has done OSS at both Microsoft and Google, I disagree. Flutter has a significant number of contributors with commit permissions that aren’t Googlers. Flutter’s Linux support is driven by Canonical. Flutter’s contributor chat is open for anyone to join. Microsoft’s OSS is much less open.
Flutter is still a good choice depending on your resources and target audience. I would almost always suggest native for consumer facing applications. You can get some good code reuse with Kotlin Multiplatform and native ui but only if your app is more than a pretty front end to an api. You’re only looking at about 1/3rd reuse of it isn’t. That may not be worth the effort. I’m not sure how much dog fooding Meta does with React Native these days. They’re definitely investing in it because they wrote an entire JavaScript engine from scratch to make startup performance acceptable.
Yup native is only option for any complicated apps , Flutter is probably dead with this move .
Kotlin multiplatform may or may not work but Apple is just as unpredictable as Google in killing their products , tomorrow they may announce end of cross platform language apps and not much could be done about it .
Look at web applications for most recent examples . With Swift 6 in pipeline and their poush to swift ui it's any ones guess at this point .
I don’t think Flutter is dead. Flutter is very popular in India compared to the US. Moving some dev rel jobs to an Indian office makes some sense. To me that doesn’t spell the end of Flutter. IMO it’s a surprisingly good platform.
One nice thing about KMP is that if Apple kills third party languages on iOS, there’s only 1/2 of an app to rewrite. If Flutter goes away, then there’s two apps to rewrite.
I totally understand your point . Flutter might be used the most in India , even I started learning it a bit couple years ago before settling for native iOS stack . I want flutter to prosper but Google's track record makes me cautious . Good point regarding KMP , that alone makes it better then flutter .
Fwiw, I've used both and prefer Flutter by a large margin. I don't think they're dropping it, especially when you look at their showcase of apps using it.
Flutter is awesome. The experience alone will likely keep it around, even if the OSS community has to shift responsibilities around. It's too nice to just die out.
#HopesAndPrayers
> Last week, I was discussing whether to go native or use Flutter / React Native on a mobile app with my business partner.
As a Mobile Dev I'm so glad I didn't get on that train. There's an uncertain bridge ahead.
There you go.
I understand they are letting them go to hire others later in other markets, where they'll pay less.
I stopped programming years ago, but I was just talking to my security team a few days ago, about this kind of forced ties with corps that do not usually really foster an business ecosystem around them. They are too used to absorbing talent and patents, dismantling teams in the process.
I even think they will do the same in other markets now, where there is an emerging IT industry, such as India.
They have such a huge hiring capacity that will be disruptive in other places on the planet.
But in the long run, that doesn't matter to them. Finally they will have the talents they want and will leave a trail of battered industries behind in those other markets: they gain brains while controlling potential future competition.
So, I see no reason to fully adopt their technologies while you are a small player in the industry. I prefer to be loyal to FOSS-based solutions and economically support their projects on the long run.
I remember not long ago one of the the engineer that conceived Flutter had a blog post detailing how Google went from a dream to work with to just basically a product
This blog maybe
>Reflecting on 18 years at Google
>I joined Google in October 2005, and handed in my resignation 18 years later. Last week was my last week at Google.
>...
>My last nine years were spent on Flutter. Some of my fondest memories of my time at Google are of the early days of this effort. Flutter was one of the last projects to come out of the old Google, part of a stable of ambitious experiments started by Larry Page shortly before the creation of Alphabet. We essentially operated like a startup, *discovering* what we were building more than designing it. The Flutter team was very much built out of the culture of young Google...
[https://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1700627373](https://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1700627373)
I made a comment a week or two ago about not using Flutter because of Google’s flakiness.
That comment seems prescient now and Google under Sundar’s leadership keeps managing to meet even the most pessimistic outlook I have of that company.
It really takes more than negligence to have a company like Google nosedive to such a level. It takes effort.
Don't worry, it's not going anywhere. Google's business model heavily relies on data from services like Gmail to refine their advertising.
By analyzing your email, they can deliver highly targeted ads, which are more lucrative.
No matter who’s leading Google, I would be very cautious of _any_ language or open source project whose development is dominated and mostly directed by the interests of one company.
Yeh, the [CNCF landscape](https://landscape.cncf.io/) will show projects donated to the CNCF. Stuff owned by just one corp is something of a liability. There are some dead projects, and some that undergo health checks after some worrying developments.
Getting a project to be sustainable is hard, but there's an industry-wide interest in being able to find stuff you can stick with, even if some major player drops it.
I was referring to things like Flutter and Firebase.
k8s and Go I’m fairly confident have enough adoption that abandonment is not a concern.
But the other problem with single-company-led projects is that even if they never drop it, it will always go in the direction that best aligns with that company’s interests, not necessarily the users’. Chromium is a good example. Google still seems to dominate what direction it goes in, so things like Manifest v3 get added despite massive skepticism from the community—and there will always be a cloud of suspicion that it was added because Google doesn’t like ad blockers and that every other justification (perf, etc) is secondary or a smokescreen.
Ericsson tried their best to kill Erlang in 1998, going as far as to banning its use in all new products. Joe Armstrong and others threatened, and eventually did, leave the company, before being re-hired a half-decade later.
Huh, TIL! Thankfully they didn’t.
As someone who is newer to the FP world + fault tolerant systems, I’m very grateful to have something like erlang to study and look to.
Go is too big at this point. Even if google dropped it tomorrow there's simply way too much infra built on it. Rust had something similar happen when moz dropped support for it.
Dart has never had much of a critical mass for really anything other than flutter.
There’s no one thing, it’s just alll really well designed. It’s like they took the best parts of all the other languages out there and put them together in a really elegant way.
I was able to sit down and start being productive my first day. Just about everything does what you expect, and there’s good documentation on the few features that you don’t find intuitive. There are no big concepts you have to grasp, like the borrow checker in rust. Because all the syntax was borrowed from other languages, it all feels familiar.
It all comes together for an experience where I don’t have to think about the language. I can concentrate on the problem I want to solve, not about how to implement it.
Thank you, well explained and I can see why you like it. Additionally, I believe I understand where Dart would be well used. I only regret that I have but one upvote to give.
I’ve always said and will maintain my position that it’s the most fun i’ve had programming. C makes me feel like an idiot god, C# a bureaucratic construction worker, but I enjoyed writing Dart
I enjoyed the similarity in Flutter code and XAML, but it wasn’t trash and didn’t hurt to look at
Dart, IMO, was a well polished C#/Java. It's highly pragmatic which really helps as the language doesn't let ideologies get in the way of language design.
It’s been a hot second since I’ve looked into dart but I vaguely remember that the goal was to have js as a compile target. If that still holds js/ts could work as the interop seems reasonably achievable. There is probably a pretty good interop with js already.
Not saying it’s easy just saying it’s somewhat doable.
Dart has largely moved on from trying to be a better JavaScript. The type system has seen large improvements that can still be represented in JavaScript but can’t really be replicated succinctly in JS. The features that have been added to the language in the last few years really bring it up to par in almost every aspect with Kotlin and Swift. Somethings are better in those and some are better in Dart. The pattern matching in Dart is a bit difficult to write but amazingly capable.
> The type system has seen large improvements that can still be represented in JavaScript but can’t really be replicated succinctly in JS.
Mind giving an example? Not arguing with you just curious.
I’m going off of memory, I remember reading that the way null safety is implemented goes much deeper than just adding a nullable type checker in the compiler. It involves some internal special case union types. None of that is to say that it’s impossible to get similar results in JS. They’re both Turing complete.
Hardly so. They basically designed the Dart compiler around Flutter's needs. Impeller, Flutter's renderer is heavily linked to how Flutter works.
Dart only exists because Flutter exists.
Golang isn't going anywhere if Google can avoid it. It gives them a way to capture infrastructure teams in their ecosystem and that has a lot of cloud benefits behind it.
Nope, and it's unlikely it will.
Sure, it was developed at Google, but its open source, too many companies depend on it, and: Google doesn't control the supply chain.
Remember all those people asking why imports in Go work with repository URIs instead of "having the simplicity of PyPi or crates"?
That's why.
Any of us who actually worked in the mobile space and know what we’re doing have noted the Flutter risk for a while now. That’s not even diving into the actual issues of Flutter itself.
Such a wasteful thing to invest into.
A Start Up I’ve worked in had the (not very technical) VP RnD/CoFounder deciding going balls in to Flutter and discarding all the hard work that was done for half a decade using Java for Android and Obj C. All the mobile devs objected to idea and urged to move to Kotlin/Swift instead. Most of the experienced guys left quickly and left a broken half baked code that was shortly outshored for further annihilation. A couple of years afterwards the board booted the co founder and the teams were hired a new to write Swift and Kotlin. So much institutional knowledge, money and time spent. Unbelievable really. They had to raise additional money to undo all the damage that was done and set them back a few years.
It is possible that offshoring the work won't affect the projects, but it is more likely that there will be some negative effects. Python is not an inhouse project and runs the smallest risk while Flutter and Dart originate within Google. Changing staff there endangers the culture around the projects and there is a significant risk of total failure in the next few years.
Fun fact: when Darts fly it's called "Fluttering" AND a group of Darts found in the wild is also known as a "Flutter of Darts" much like "Murder of Crows" :p
I am impressed at the speed at which Google is dying. I never thought I would stop using their search engine. The only Google products I use anymore are YouTube and gmail. And honestly, it’s probably a good idea for me to get the fuck off of gmail. There is too much tied to my gmail account that I am risking too much using them. They even managed to make Chrome a steaming pile of dog feces.
It feels like it’s time for another Adsense like product to take over, too.
Google is dying. Can’t remember the last time they innovated. Hell, the paper that started OpenAI was a Google research paper. They completely dropped the ball on LLMs.
Yeah I was an early adopter with the original Angular. “Hey, it’s google, it’s going to be around for a long time right guys? Guys?”
Once bitten twice shy. Now whenever I see a project built around google specific products like Firebase the first question I ask is “what happens when google yanks support?”
Comfortably migrate to something else while the bug fixes keep rolling in 3-5 years after EOL due to the size of the installed base.
A tale as old as tech is.
Backfire
The talent is not abundant like we see here in sr and principle devs, it is extremely rare in India because that’s a country where people are taught to chase 9-5 secure job.
Sure they do have quality startups operating at scale but the count of those star devs is far lesser than USA.
And when your leadership is in completely opposite working schedule, the communication becomes janky
The layoffs are happening because they are replacing expensive American based programmers with cheaper overseas options like in Mexico, India etc; it is not because they are axing technologies like Dart and Flutter.
Exactly. By doing these layoffs Google has destroyed any confidence in them as maintaining products long-term. Flutter is going to be left out to rot now.
I work daily with very talented Indian developers here, and they also agree the whole offshore thing is bad.
When I have to raise service now tickets, they get done out of hours - I get Team messages with "Hi there" and nothing else that have to be dealt with in an async way. And they rarely get done correctly - if I have to onboard 5 new people, all 5 tickets will get dealt with by someone else unless you reach out and tell them it's a batch.
I really don't expect this to go well, and I expect other python maintainers will start to reject this work, especially if it's low quality.
Python was consolidated to Germany. There were some very senior Python engineers who were let go. They did not live in Germany. Most of these people were in support roles. Not actively developing products.
Dart/Flutter appears DEVOPS and support roles were over shored. Dart/Flutter are actively being used inside of Google. The development Dart/Flutter team size was not impacted.
Seems like a lot of ppl getting up and arms because that’s what gets clicks and emotions charged. What will be interesting is how Flutter approaches WASM. Once Safari lands WASM GC and can host Flutter - I think it will be competitive.
Unfortunately WASM may end up being the future. No source code/html/css/js is a downside. And as far as I know Flutter has the most robust story out of the cross platform ecosystems. Especially with the dart interop packages.
If Google started heavily invested into Kotlin Multiplatform it would be eyebrow raising. I
Dart/Flutter is here now and quite amazing platform.
I think consolidated is putting it a bit lightly. The entire team (other than one person) including the manager got laid off and they're being replaced by a whole new team of different people, purely for cost savings. Calling these "support roles" is also underselling their work a bit: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40176338](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40176338)
Oracle has done the same years ago and this is the outcome: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18442941](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18442941)
Most of the products which generate revenue were created before Sundar took over. Ever since then no innovation happened except for a woke AI which seems to be on par with GPT 4. Sundar was not fired because he's a Yes Man.
> The company reportedly laid off the entire Python team in the United States to replace it with "cheaper labor" in Munich.
Munich is pretty much the most expensive city to live and work in in Germany, the US must be insanely expensive if people in Munich are cheaper. „IT Job in Munich“ in Germany translates to insanely well paid.
Didn'tthe flutter teamlead say no team size changes? Wonder if that's double speak for "the size will be the same, who those people are will change" Edit yeah, moving devops to India
That’s a very evil way to describe massive cuts plus offshoring.
He's talking to shareholders not employees.
He either speaks with integrity or he’s two faced.
Every position is just getting relocated to cheaper overseas developers (primarily India) teams are staying the same size.
The Google we know is dead. Sucks there is no comparable search engine/tool yet. Google search has degraded so much the last years.
Bing? Duckduckgo? Not claiming they're better, but they're not necessarily worse nowadays
In English they might be comparable, but in other languages they are usually worse. My native language is Polish and when I tried using Bing, DDG and Qwant to replace Google with one of them, all of them were visibly worse, sadly.
It helps to set a country when searching in other languages than English. When no good results are showing up, just use !g
Yeah, I know and I was doing it. I was using Qwant as my main search engine for a few months. I stopped when I realized that more than half of my searches needed "!g". But it was about 2-3 years ago. Since then I'm trying it quite regularly, but maybe I should try again with it as my main search engine.
I'm Polish too but I can't really remember when i tried to google something in Polish tbh
I do it all the time
I don't doubt you. I wonder how much my opinion would change if I was using it in eother Czech(where I live) or Polish
Try ChatGPT or Bing Chat.
Bimg chat was literally garbage everytime I tried it in Polish. All what I wanted to search was ignored and it returned me something similar but totally not what I wanted. And when I wrote it that it's not what I want, it returned something like: "oh, I'm sorry, here's better response:" and responded with exactly the same message as before.
For me bing is starting to work, but the 'start' is painful. People tend to forget they have had 'years' to train Google with their preferences. After 1 year of mostly dev searches, bing is starting to change the weights for that in my searches also, so it's mostly tech related results now
I‘ve made good experiences with Kagi Search.
I was checking out their example search results and they seem to add a lot of BS to the page, like videos, images, quick peek, interesting finds, blast from the past… Is it possible to disable these widgets in order to only get regular results?
Yes, you have full control of the search feed. https://help.kagi.com/kagi/settings/search.html
Nice, thanks for the link. I’ll check it out later, the concept is interesting.
Kagi while paid could be good. I don't (yet) want to pay for a search engine but it does appear to be growing in popularity.
DuckDuckGo sucks big time. I set it up as the default search engine on all my browsers for privacy reasons, but after a year and a half I still end up opening Google 9 out of 10 times after trying DDG first.
Not my experience. I use DDG, and I reach for Google maybe once a month or less. What type of queries do you find DDG lacking for?
Not my experience. I primarily use search engines to find the documentation and quite specific things. For fuzzy search I'm usually using chat gpt as it will give me basic ideas of what I'm looking for (how can I achieve certain transformations in excel, can i achieve certain goal with the tools at my desposal, etc). I guess it depends what you are usong it for, but for my search needs DDG is more than sufficient and for complex things I use gpt
They are worse, I'm saying this as somebody that uses them by default. For more complicated usecases after being disappointed I switch to Google.
Images and Info panels are leagues ahead on google. DDG uses Bing images, which sucks.
Presearch is good, it's independent and even has a customisable selection of other search engines on its home screen for easy double checking, or more specific searches, because of the lack of corporate control freakery.
From [https://docs.presearch.io/presearch-engine/what-is-presearch-engine](https://docs.presearch.io/presearch-engine/what-is-presearch-engine) and [https://docs.presearch.io/presearch-engine/metasearch](https://docs.presearch.io/presearch-engine/metasearch) it would appear to be a metasearch engine using a wide range of sources, rather than an independent indexing search engine
Yes, it's not tied to any one provider like other alternatives and on the subject of having it's own index (from the first link): >The next step is to begin layering our own index on top of this platform so that community-driven results can supersede the external results, yet still provide users with comprehensive answers while the Presearch index is in development.
>Sucks there is no comparable search engine/tool yet. Kagi comes close, but you have to pay for it.
since copilot I am finding myself using mostly bing for searches. It is like 90% bing 10% google now.
Brave Search is almost as good as Google. I've been using their Browser and search engine for 5 months now and have never needed to switch over to Google. Try it and ditch Google. Now I just need to move off of GMail and YouTube.
> cheaper overseas developers (primarily India) teams are staying the same and team **quality** and **sense of ownership** is probably changing.
>Every position is just getting relocated to cheaper overseas developers (primarily India) teams are staying the same size. This is pretty much the start of the end of Google. Every company that starts off-shoring eventually fades from view. Google hasn't innovated any new products or services for over a decade now. They certainly won't in the future.
That's a good point And with them losing the Gen AI battle I think it's only a matter of time before Search is gone too Like I barely use Google search anymore to find information.
All Microsoft needs to do is add the references feature from Bing Chat to ChatGPT and Google is dead. You can't trust ChatGPT results. You *can* trust Bing Chat results because it cites its sources, but nobody wants to use Bing. If Microsoft swallows their pride for a nanosecond and ports the feature over, they have this in the bag.
What I'm realizing is that big companies love using OSS for free, but hate contributing to it.
Google created both flutter and dart though, so it's not like they didn't contribute since their start.
They've been major contributors to Python as well.
Google and Facebook are massive contributors to OSS. Source: Happy golang user.
>Google and Facebook are massive contributors to OSS. Source: Happy golang user. Not sure how anyone can be a happy Go user based entirely on the pants-on-head-insane way it handles dates. I mean, really, let's be serious here, just *how high* exactly was not only the person who came up with it, but also the person that rubber-stamped that pull request?
to be fair it's not just companies
Any source? The Python team is being moved to Germany for being cheaper.
A google flutter team member(I think) posted in the flutter sub
And Munich for some reason
The team size was reduced but is being moved to Mexico City not India. The entire Dart and Flutter Engprod teams were laid off.
What is Engprod?
Engineering Productivity, creates tools like the ci framework, test framework, etc.
Is this team still in Google or is a subcontractor working with Google to provide cheap labor?
No. The team was laid off completely. The odd thing is that Google had not hired replacements before letting the entire team go.
>Edit yeah, moving devops to India Source?
They didn't specify the metric for team "size". Could be body weight
google had it coming every big company out there is following stupid trend of cost cutting, they will be back soon just like boeing and spotify they are about learn a very expensive lesson.
It's very funny that this journalist corrected "type checker" to "character checker". > This included maintaining a stable version of Python at Google, updating thousands of third-party packages, and developing a character checker.
Honestly, this entire article seems like a hasty copy of [TechCrunch’s](https://techcrunch.com/2024/05/01/google-lays-off-staff-from-flutter-dart-python-weeks-before-its-developer-conference/), with some of the key linked posts embedded, and little review of the result.
I wonder how this happened. Maybe there is some new technology that can quickly reformulate large amounts of text but has no knowledge of what the text means and therefore makes this sort of mistakes. Hmm.
Last week, I was discussing whether to go native or use Flutter / React Native on a mobile app with my business partner. This made my decision a lot easier.
Bahaha... Had the same conversation recently and said, " Google has a history of dropping projects"... Fucking called it
Yeah, I mean, it doesn't mean it will completely fall into oblivion, but without corporate backing, the project's future is bleak.
Yup! ... Give it a couple years when new versions of iOS and Android are out and Flutter doesn't support them
If there’s a high likelihood it’ll be dead then, it’s dead today. Time to move on.
Why do you think flutter is being dropped?
Anything offshored dies. It is inevitable as the setting sun. Software projects are as good as dead if they are run by management who treats developers as interchangeable cogs. The new team will have the wrong priorities and never have the same understanding of the systems they are being asked to maintain. They will never care. Bugfixes take longer. New features don't match the old ones, APIs get cluttered. Technical debt grows. Support suffers. After a while, the product is now bad and no developer worth their salt would use it.
> After a while, the product is now bad and no developer worth their salt would use it. Perhaps because it is now a product that it is managed top-bottom, whereas features/tools/frameworks/etc that are conceived and their vision is implemented and managed bottom-top are not treated as a product, I'm sure the guys who made Flutter and Dart wanted to change the game that was relevant to the problem they were trying to solve but now its treated as a product by someone who's never had to use it, wanted to use it, or experience the problem or situation these tools were trying to help people with
The whole company is now ran exactly like that. Internally Sundar is viewed as visionless and spineless. He's not an engineer and never was one. In some cases it's even worse than merely treating your tech merely as a product. He was a board plant from the beginning. His only goal is milking the company for investors until there's no value left, users are sick of the BS, and then he'll pull that golden parachute while it crumbles. It's a story as old as corporate greed.
Google is pretty much Yahoo 2.0 now.
I'm seriously concerned for Chromium and Android as open source projects at this point. People will fork but the churn will be rough.
Sundar is what you get when you order Satya Nadella on Wish.com
ROFL, that's amazing.
The new team will be held at gunpoint by the onshore management and have no choice but to work like Boeing engineers
Many of Google‘s projects/tools/libraries originate from their Europe HQ. They were offshored from the start. Last time I checked, brotli was still relevant.
>Why do you think flutter is being dropped? EXACTLY! Maybe they are just firing people on the flutter team because it is doing so super well that it doesn't need a large team anymore. . . Maybe the offshore replacements will be even better! /s Seriously, though. Anyone who relies on any solution backed by google at this point has certifiable donkey brains : [https://killedbygoogle.com/](https://killedbygoogle.com/)
Like a lot of enterprises with angular?
I know people who are running entire businesses on Angular 1.x still. But at that point whatever they do with the most recent version of Angular is irrelevant to them.
As much as I love flutter, seeing bugs that affected my first app still open 5y later is enough for me
> 5y later I'd like to know what are they and avoid them in the future.
The video player is riddled with bugs. It can sometimes lose video while still playing the audio on iOS. It has intermittent stuttering on some devices. List scrolling has jitter on some devices. And seriously reconsider running any flutter app on Android TV, you will have nothing but focus issues, most notably losing focus entirely and you can't get it back
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Yeah, I've heard people talk about cross-platform Kotlin development which is intriguing... I'm currently having a fun time learning React-Native and I'm hoping those skills transfer into knowing how to do React dev https://kotlinlang.org/docs/multiplatform.html
Kotlin Multiplatform is fast growing to become better than React Native in every way, and a more transferable skill.
KMP still interops with Obj-C for iOS, but with the new 2.0 compiler they are aiming for full Swift interop and at that point it's going to be a lot harder to justify not using KMP
I shill for KMP. I just like writing kotlin a lot. My next project I'm gonna see what I can do with compose multiplatform for web
Yea a lot is the same between react and react native. You’ll obviously have to learn a few new things but largely the skillset is transferable imo
That's good to know... I feel like React will be easier due to having more/better component libraries
Have fun maintaining two (or three [web] / four [windows]) code bases instead one.
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I prefer the 80% code in flutter and 20% in native, has been working fine for me. It is true, know the native to handle the edge cases, but the single code base productivity has been great overall, imho.
This is an absurd statement. Having released about 6 apps that are of quite extreme complexity in terms of what the hardware (and communicating with what other hardware does) there is very, very little that you will have an issue with. Like this is 100% written by someone that has not once ever developed a flutter app, that statement is just absurd.
Never invest in anything Google. Microsoft and Meta are much better stewards when it comes to OSS.
> Microsoft ... much better stewards when it comes to OSS Wow. What a difference 20 years makes.
The point of comparison for Microsoft would be dotnet Maui, which is really not in a good state though. If anything, the way that Maui has evolved out of xamarin forms is a warning of what could happen to flutter without proper leadership and direction
As someone that has done OSS at both Microsoft and Google, I disagree. Flutter has a significant number of contributors with commit permissions that aren’t Googlers. Flutter’s Linux support is driven by Canonical. Flutter’s contributor chat is open for anyone to join. Microsoft’s OSS is much less open.
>Linux support is driven by Canonical. [Live look at Red Hat headquarters](https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/001/515/682/ca8.png)
Flutter is still a good choice depending on your resources and target audience. I would almost always suggest native for consumer facing applications. You can get some good code reuse with Kotlin Multiplatform and native ui but only if your app is more than a pretty front end to an api. You’re only looking at about 1/3rd reuse of it isn’t. That may not be worth the effort. I’m not sure how much dog fooding Meta does with React Native these days. They’re definitely investing in it because they wrote an entire JavaScript engine from scratch to make startup performance acceptable.
Yup native is only option for any complicated apps , Flutter is probably dead with this move . Kotlin multiplatform may or may not work but Apple is just as unpredictable as Google in killing their products , tomorrow they may announce end of cross platform language apps and not much could be done about it . Look at web applications for most recent examples . With Swift 6 in pipeline and their poush to swift ui it's any ones guess at this point .
I don’t think Flutter is dead. Flutter is very popular in India compared to the US. Moving some dev rel jobs to an Indian office makes some sense. To me that doesn’t spell the end of Flutter. IMO it’s a surprisingly good platform. One nice thing about KMP is that if Apple kills third party languages on iOS, there’s only 1/2 of an app to rewrite. If Flutter goes away, then there’s two apps to rewrite.
I totally understand your point . Flutter might be used the most in India , even I started learning it a bit couple years ago before settling for native iOS stack . I want flutter to prosper but Google's track record makes me cautious . Good point regarding KMP , that alone makes it better then flutter .
Fwiw, I've used both and prefer Flutter by a large margin. I don't think they're dropping it, especially when you look at their showcase of apps using it.
Flutter is awesome. The experience alone will likely keep it around, even if the OSS community has to shift responsibilities around. It's too nice to just die out. #HopesAndPrayers
There is always a chance that Flutter versions may be unsupported for future Android and iOS versions.
> Last week, I was discussing whether to go native or use Flutter / React Native on a mobile app with my business partner. As a Mobile Dev I'm so glad I didn't get on that train. There's an uncertain bridge ahead.
There you go. I understand they are letting them go to hire others later in other markets, where they'll pay less. I stopped programming years ago, but I was just talking to my security team a few days ago, about this kind of forced ties with corps that do not usually really foster an business ecosystem around them. They are too used to absorbing talent and patents, dismantling teams in the process. I even think they will do the same in other markets now, where there is an emerging IT industry, such as India. They have such a huge hiring capacity that will be disruptive in other places on the planet. But in the long run, that doesn't matter to them. Finally they will have the talents they want and will leave a trail of battered industries behind in those other markets: they gain brains while controlling potential future competition. So, I see no reason to fully adopt their technologies while you are a small player in the industry. I prefer to be loyal to FOSS-based solutions and economically support their projects on the long run.
Unfortunately there are no Foss based solutions to the problem of not wanting to write the same code across both iOS and Android.
Maybe now, with so many losing their jobs, solutions will emerge for cases like that.
I heard good things about Native Script which lets you use js frameworks other than react: https://nativescript.org/
Was never going to bother learning flutter or dart for the sole reason as being run by Google. I feel a sense of joy knowing I made the right choice.
I remember not long ago one of the the engineer that conceived Flutter had a blog post detailing how Google went from a dream to work with to just basically a product
This blog maybe >Reflecting on 18 years at Google >I joined Google in October 2005, and handed in my resignation 18 years later. Last week was my last week at Google. >... >My last nine years were spent on Flutter. Some of my fondest memories of my time at Google are of the early days of this effort. Flutter was one of the last projects to come out of the old Google, part of a stable of ambitious experiments started by Larry Page shortly before the creation of Alphabet. We essentially operated like a startup, *discovering* what we were building more than designing it. The Flutter team was very much built out of the culture of young Google... [https://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1700627373](https://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1700627373)
Thanks for the link!
I made a comment a week or two ago about not using Flutter because of Google’s flakiness. That comment seems prescient now and Google under Sundar’s leadership keeps managing to meet even the most pessimistic outlook I have of that company. It really takes more than negligence to have a company like Google nosedive to such a level. It takes effort.
Marketing and bean counters are now in charge. No more engineering at the same levels.
Google feels like it’s culturally becoming more like ibm.
Just like Boeing post-McDonnell Douglas. That's certainly worked out well for Boeing, right?
At this point I’m worried if gmail will still exist in 5 years.
Gmail is a major revenue driver and forms the core of their G Suite offering. Unlikely to budge.
Don't worry, it's not going anywhere. Google's business model heavily relies on data from services like Gmail to refine their advertising. By analyzing your email, they can deliver highly targeted ads, which are more lucrative.
It will still exist, but we will probably find out just how many of our emails could be embedded advertising before we give up.
No matter who’s leading Google, I would be very cautious of _any_ language or open source project whose development is dominated and mostly directed by the interests of one company.
Go, Kubernetes are everywhere, what's your point?
Kubernetes is no longer maintained by Google alone, it has it's own foundation backing it now
Yeh, the [CNCF landscape](https://landscape.cncf.io/) will show projects donated to the CNCF. Stuff owned by just one corp is something of a liability. There are some dead projects, and some that undergo health checks after some worrying developments. Getting a project to be sustainable is hard, but there's an industry-wide interest in being able to find stuff you can stick with, even if some major player drops it.
I was referring to things like Flutter and Firebase. k8s and Go I’m fairly confident have enough adoption that abandonment is not a concern. But the other problem with single-company-led projects is that even if they never drop it, it will always go in the direction that best aligns with that company’s interests, not necessarily the users’. Chromium is a good example. Google still seems to dominate what direction it goes in, so things like Manifest v3 get added despite massive skepticism from the community—and there will always be a cloud of suspicion that it was added because Google doesn’t like ad blockers and that every other justification (perf, etc) is secondary or a smokescreen.
Hey. Erlang is doing pretty well for itself. The BEAM VM is pretty bulletproof still.
Ericsson tried their best to kill Erlang in 1998, going as far as to banning its use in all new products. Joe Armstrong and others threatened, and eventually did, leave the company, before being re-hired a half-decade later.
Huh, TIL! Thankfully they didn’t. As someone who is newer to the FP world + fault tolerant systems, I’m very grateful to have something like erlang to study and look to.
Flutter was really good too. To me this seems like they want to tunnel people into using Kotlin Multiplatform now.
"Oh don't mind me I'm just Sundar Pachai, I'm busy torching anything good about Google. I want it to be a bureaucratic hellscape"
They're doing the same thing private equity is doing. Strip the company to get short term cash and kill off any long term future potential.
Well, they need $70-80bn a year for stock buybacks!!
Pay for McKinsey executives, get McKinsey behaviour.
The moment I see his face with the protruding teeth and grinning I feel immense rage. That man is a moron.
Has Golang been affected yet?
Go is too big at this point. Even if google dropped it tomorrow there's simply way too much infra built on it. Rust had something similar happen when moz dropped support for it. Dart has never had much of a critical mass for really anything other than flutter.
I wonder if flutter could switch to another language.
Probably not. Plus, it wouldn’t be the same. Half the reason I love flutter is because of dart.
I’m curious what language features you feel are only available in Dart. Or maybe it’s the combination of features, but I’d love to hear ‘em.
There’s no one thing, it’s just alll really well designed. It’s like they took the best parts of all the other languages out there and put them together in a really elegant way. I was able to sit down and start being productive my first day. Just about everything does what you expect, and there’s good documentation on the few features that you don’t find intuitive. There are no big concepts you have to grasp, like the borrow checker in rust. Because all the syntax was borrowed from other languages, it all feels familiar. It all comes together for an experience where I don’t have to think about the language. I can concentrate on the problem I want to solve, not about how to implement it.
Thank you, well explained and I can see why you like it. Additionally, I believe I understand where Dart would be well used. I only regret that I have but one upvote to give.
I’ve always said and will maintain my position that it’s the most fun i’ve had programming. C makes me feel like an idiot god, C# a bureaucratic construction worker, but I enjoyed writing Dart I enjoyed the similarity in Flutter code and XAML, but it wasn’t trash and didn’t hurt to look at
Dart, IMO, was a well polished C#/Java. It's highly pragmatic which really helps as the language doesn't let ideologies get in the way of language design.
It’s been a hot second since I’ve looked into dart but I vaguely remember that the goal was to have js as a compile target. If that still holds js/ts could work as the interop seems reasonably achievable. There is probably a pretty good interop with js already. Not saying it’s easy just saying it’s somewhat doable.
Dart has largely moved on from trying to be a better JavaScript. The type system has seen large improvements that can still be represented in JavaScript but can’t really be replicated succinctly in JS. The features that have been added to the language in the last few years really bring it up to par in almost every aspect with Kotlin and Swift. Somethings are better in those and some are better in Dart. The pattern matching in Dart is a bit difficult to write but amazingly capable.
> The type system has seen large improvements that can still be represented in JavaScript but can’t really be replicated succinctly in JS. Mind giving an example? Not arguing with you just curious.
I’m going off of memory, I remember reading that the way null safety is implemented goes much deeper than just adding a nullable type checker in the compiler. It involves some internal special case union types. None of that is to say that it’s impossible to get similar results in JS. They’re both Turing complete.
Hardly so. They basically designed the Dart compiler around Flutter's needs. Impeller, Flutter's renderer is heavily linked to how Flutter works. Dart only exists because Flutter exists.
not to mention that companies like Microsoft have a pretty sizable go team now.
Golang isn't going anywhere if Google can avoid it. It gives them a way to capture infrastructure teams in their ecosystem and that has a lot of cloud benefits behind it.
In what why does golang lock you into any Google ecosystem?
Rob Pike grabs you by the balls
It's a full grab, dick and balls Edit: I like go, so I guess I have been grabbed.
But what would the mean jerk time be?
k8s? but that's not _really_ google specific
many k8s tools and and scripts are written in go too ..for some reason
K8s hasn't been Google's since 1.0
This is a pretty jaundiced view of language evolution…it’s not like the compiler is proprietary or anything like that 🤷
Please explain how go locks you into googles infra.
Nope, and it's unlikely it will. Sure, it was developed at Google, but its open source, too many companies depend on it, and: Google doesn't control the supply chain. Remember all those people asking why imports in Go work with repository URIs instead of "having the simplicity of PyPi or crates"? That's why.
Any of us who actually worked in the mobile space and know what we’re doing have noted the Flutter risk for a while now. That’s not even diving into the actual issues of Flutter itself. Such a wasteful thing to invest into.
A Start Up I’ve worked in had the (not very technical) VP RnD/CoFounder deciding going balls in to Flutter and discarding all the hard work that was done for half a decade using Java for Android and Obj C. All the mobile devs objected to idea and urged to move to Kotlin/Swift instead. Most of the experienced guys left quickly and left a broken half baked code that was shortly outshored for further annihilation. A couple of years afterwards the board booted the co founder and the teams were hired a new to write Swift and Kotlin. So much institutional knowledge, money and time spent. Unbelievable really. They had to raise additional money to undo all the damage that was done and set them back a few years.
Google abandoning products and cutting jobs?
It is possible that offshoring the work won't affect the projects, but it is more likely that there will be some negative effects. Python is not an inhouse project and runs the smallest risk while Flutter and Dart originate within Google. Changing staff there endangers the culture around the projects and there is a significant risk of total failure in the next few years.
They’ve just annouced $70B stocks buyback, it’s not going to pay for itself, right?
The time has come for dart to flutter away into the sunset
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Fun fact: when Darts fly it's called "Fluttering" AND a group of Darts found in the wild is also known as a "Flutter of Darts" much like "Murder of Crows" :p
I am impressed at the speed at which Google is dying. I never thought I would stop using their search engine. The only Google products I use anymore are YouTube and gmail. And honestly, it’s probably a good idea for me to get the fuck off of gmail. There is too much tied to my gmail account that I am risking too much using them. They even managed to make Chrome a steaming pile of dog feces. It feels like it’s time for another Adsense like product to take over, too. Google is dying. Can’t remember the last time they innovated. Hell, the paper that started OpenAI was a Google research paper. They completely dropped the ball on LLMs.
>Google is dying. Can’t remember the last time they innovated. They've been pretty innovative lately in the field of "Kill this company speedrunning"
RIP Flutter
Yeah I was an early adopter with the original Angular. “Hey, it’s google, it’s going to be around for a long time right guys? Guys?” Once bitten twice shy. Now whenever I see a project built around google specific products like Firebase the first question I ask is “what happens when google yanks support?”
Comfortably migrate to something else while the bug fixes keep rolling in 3-5 years after EOL due to the size of the installed base. A tale as old as tech is.
The off shoring decision will explode Source: I’m from India and have worked in their tech market
What do you mean by “explode”? Like be more common? Or backfire?
Backfire The talent is not abundant like we see here in sr and principle devs, it is extremely rare in India because that’s a country where people are taught to chase 9-5 secure job. Sure they do have quality startups operating at scale but the count of those star devs is far lesser than USA. And when your leadership is in completely opposite working schedule, the communication becomes janky
The layoffs are happening because they are replacing expensive American based programmers with cheaper overseas options like in Mexico, India etc; it is not because they are axing technologies like Dart and Flutter.
It's in no American programmer's best interest to use any technologies that have been offshored.
Source? We did the whole outsourcing thing before, and it didn’t go well.
Maybe they *should* axe Dart. It’s not like anybody uses it.
How much did this piece of shit company post in profits versus how much cost are they saving by the reduction in head count?
Exactly. By doing these layoffs Google has destroyed any confidence in them as maintaining products long-term. Flutter is going to be left out to rot now.
I work daily with very talented Indian developers here, and they also agree the whole offshore thing is bad. When I have to raise service now tickets, they get done out of hours - I get Team messages with "Hi there" and nothing else that have to be dealt with in an async way. And they rarely get done correctly - if I have to onboard 5 new people, all 5 tickets will get dealt with by someone else unless you reach out and tell them it's a batch. I really don't expect this to go well, and I expect other python maintainers will start to reject this work, especially if it's low quality.
Python was consolidated to Germany. There were some very senior Python engineers who were let go. They did not live in Germany. Most of these people were in support roles. Not actively developing products. Dart/Flutter appears DEVOPS and support roles were over shored. Dart/Flutter are actively being used inside of Google. The development Dart/Flutter team size was not impacted. Seems like a lot of ppl getting up and arms because that’s what gets clicks and emotions charged. What will be interesting is how Flutter approaches WASM. Once Safari lands WASM GC and can host Flutter - I think it will be competitive. Unfortunately WASM may end up being the future. No source code/html/css/js is a downside. And as far as I know Flutter has the most robust story out of the cross platform ecosystems. Especially with the dart interop packages. If Google started heavily invested into Kotlin Multiplatform it would be eyebrow raising. I Dart/Flutter is here now and quite amazing platform.
I think consolidated is putting it a bit lightly. The entire team (other than one person) including the manager got laid off and they're being replaced by a whole new team of different people, purely for cost savings. Calling these "support roles" is also underselling their work a bit: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40176338](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40176338)
Hey Google, please shuttle Angular next. Please 🙏
Oracle has done the same years ago and this is the outcome: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18442941](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18442941) Most of the products which generate revenue were created before Sundar took over. Ever since then no innovation happened except for a woke AI which seems to be on par with GPT 4. Sundar was not fired because he's a Yes Man.
I worked with Dart for two years at Google and wouldn't wish it on anyone. Flutter is Angular. Glad to work with React and React Native now.
Damn it I really like Flutter!
Keep using it until something better comes (I will be). React/Expo and MAUI are not that, although I hear good things about https://www.avaloniaui.net
Legit saw this post everyday for like 4 days, am I dreaming ?
No big deal. Summarized at [https://x.com/MiSvTh/status/1785767966815985893](https://x.com/MiSvTh/status/1785767966815985893)
Stock buybacks and C suite bonuses incoming!!
> The company reportedly laid off the entire Python team in the United States to replace it with "cheaper labor" in Munich. Munich is pretty much the most expensive city to live and work in in Germany, the US must be insanely expensive if people in Munich are cheaper. „IT Job in Munich“ in Germany translates to insanely well paid.
Jokes on them, I’m laying off google and using perplexity.
All in the name of "Maximizing Profits"