Risks of adopting Flutter

My previous post ended by recommending "something like Flutter" against the crumminess of web tech. But it is not that simple.

First of all, Flutter's performance on the web is much worse than on the other platforms it supports. And this year (2024) this is not going to change because the Flutter developers said they are not working on it right now.

That is enough to rule out Flutter on the web, I think. But suppose that weren't the case. Here are more thoughts about it.

The argument against Flutter

Google kills its projects without mercy. The Google Cemetery website lists tens of such projects.

It is about this risk that David Heinemeier Hansson wrote something I have to quote in its entirety:

The saying "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" is at its essence about risk management. The traditional wisdom goes that if you buy from a big company, you're going to be safe. It may be more expensive, but big companies project an image of stability and reliability, so buying their wares is seen as the prudent choice. Except, it isn't. Certainly not any more. Meta killing Workplace is merely exhibit #49667.

Any company that hitched their wagon to Workplace just got served with an eviction notice. In a about a year, the data will go read-only, and shortly after that, it's game over. Now companies from Spotify to McDonalds, along with millions of others, have to scramble to find an alternative. Simply because Meta can't be bothered to maintain a platform that's merely used by millions when their consumer business is used by billions.

This, right here, is the risk of buying anything from big tech like Meta and Google. Their main ad-based cash cows are so fantastically profitable that whether it's the millions of paying accounts on Workplace or the millions of live websites once hosted by Google Domains, it all just pales in comparison, and is thus one strategy rotation away from being labeled "non-core" and killed off.

Buying from big isn't the sure bet they want you to believe. Buy from someone who actually needs your business to make the wheels go round.

How can you be sure Flutter is going to stay around? If Google dropped it, I doubt the open source community would be able to maintain it, just because it is a project that targets many platforms and requires many different kinds of expertises. It definitely would require professional organization similar to the Linux kernel or things like Gnome and KDE.

Arguments in favor of Flutter

If you follow DHH's advice and choose something from smaller companies, guess what, many of these aim to be bought, and then the rug gets pulled from under you anyway. If Microsoft buys the product, it starts to get worse with each update. But normally the product is bought to be killed. So the risk must be managed taking much more into account than just company sizes.

The price of Flutter is right for everyone. (Zero.) Xamarin used to offer a comparable product for cross-platform development which cost a thousand dollars per developer per year. And then Xamarin was bought by Microsoft and the product was included into Microsoft's own.

Cross-platform development solutions being offered by smaller organizations (that I know of), such as Qt and kivy, do not seem to be equal in scope.

I should also clarify that Flutter is NOT a toy. The most recent figure is that one million applications have been built with it. That is a very significant number in the mobile space. No other cross-platform toolkit has that number.

Incredibly relevant to the question of "what tech to use" is the advice given in the famous article "Beating the Averages", by Paul Graham, which you absolutely should read in its entirety. Nevertheless, I will quote:

We knew that everyone else was writing their software in C++ or Perl. But we also knew that that didn't mean anything. If you chose technology that way, you'd be running Windows. When you choose technology, you have to ignore what other people are doing, and consider only what will work the best.

(...)

When I was about nine I happened to get hold of a copy of "The Day of the Jackal", by Frederick Forsyth. The main character is an assassin who is hired to kill the president of France. The assassin has to get past the police to get up to an apartment that overlooks the president's route. He walks right by them, dressed up as an old man on crutches, and they never suspect him.

Our secret weapon was similar. We wrote our software in a weird AI language, with a bizarre syntax full of parentheses. For years it had annoyed me to hear Lisp described that way. But now it worked to our advantage. In business, there is nothing more valuable than a technical advantage your competitors don't understand. In business, as in war, surprise is worth as much as force.

Graham's weapon, the Lisp language, was not and still is not normally used in businesses. It is mostly used by academics. Nubank using Clojure (a lisp language) is a notable exception. (And Nubank's app is made with Flutter – they must be following Graham's advice.) But the main point is, don't do what everyone else is doing – do something better, which I think Flutter is, except for the Google risk.

Perusing discussions about the future of Flutter, I came across this comment from July 2023 that made a lot of sense to me:

Connecting the dots of what Google has been doing over the past 13+ years:

• Launched a system programming language called GO
• Forked little kernel to make Zircon
• Started the Fuchsia project on top of Zircon built with Go.
• Launched Flutter for cross platform
• Community engagement for spreading the usage of Flutter
• Build all tool kits for complete cross platform support
• Build a large swarm of one million apps running in Flutter on play store by community

So I believe Google is trying to hit the IOT market as the existing operating systems are very heavy to be interfaced with smaller devices in which Zircon based hardware is a lighter option with a lot of perks. To make that hardware accessible to masses we need an operating system which is the Fuchsia. But if an operating system is introduced to the world no one is going to use it as for the adoption we require APPS. To make those apps they selected Flutter and Dart as their native language to write apps for Fuschia. Now, they've started community engagement to make flutter a widespread tool and used community to make a unified codebase for a million apps which can be made available in both the play store and the upcoming Fuschia store. This will solve the problem of NO apps in the market for newly launching OS. (The Windows Phone team thought people would make apps instead of community engagement through the years that's why they failed miserably.)

Now when the new OS is launched it'll have a lot of apps which can simply be ported to support Fuchsia with minimal efforts and opens a whole new world of Zircon based hardware hitting the market interfacing with the new OS ushering a new era of IOT apps through Fuchsia.

So Flutter is just a part of a BIG PLAN for years and not a thing made to Die by Google.

That's all I have for you. I think Flutter is the way forward for me, but unfortunately I don't have a crystal ball to divine the future.