Flutter and Future

[Aham Brahmasmi]

Hi,

It seems the Flutter team is planning its roadmap and engaging with external developers for prioritization. It would be great if the team could help the community understand the team's perspective on an important roadblock to Flutter's adoption.

Who are the primary customers of Flutter? Are they Google's internal developer teams? Or all developer folks, irrespective of whether they are internal or external to Google?

Regards,
ab

[Seth Ladd]

Hello! Thanks for reaching out.

On Thu, Oct 5, 2017 at 3:27 AM, Aham Brahmasmi <aham.br...@gmx.com> wrote:

Hi,

It seems the Flutter team is planning its roadmap and engaging with external developers for prioritization. It would be great if the team could help the community understand the team's perspective on an important roadblock to Flutter's adoption.

Who are the primary customers of Flutter?

People with some programming experience (basic object-oriented) that want to build mobile apps for iOS and Android (either, or both).

 

Are they Google's internal developer teams?

We have numerous Google internal teams using Flutter. The Ads organization is using Flutter for a few business critical projects. Apps that have launched from Google include a "store manager" app from Google Express, and app for our sales teams.

 

Or all developer folks, irrespective of whether they are internal or external to Google?

Anyone that wants to build for mobile, and has some basic programming experience, should check out Flutter :)

Hope that helps!

 

Regards,
ab

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[Seth Ladd]

Thanks for all the feedback!

On Fri, Oct 6, 2017 at 1:10 PM, Aham Brahmasmi <aham.br...@gmx.com> wrote:

Thanks Seth for your reply.

There are a couple of things that would be great to have from an external perspective. These may or may not align with the project priorities, but would be helpful. These are personal opinions (n=1).

General
1) Communicate the Flutter teams' plans externally, and if possible, the approximate quarter when Flutter expects to execute them. Yes, everyone knows planning is hard et al. But having no visibility into what to expect is equally hard. (Hint: README.md) [1]

I appreciate why it's interesting and important to hear roadmaps, and I'm glad you also appreciate why it's hard to commit to quarters/dates. :)

Some of the high-priority items we're currently working on:

accessibility

internationalization

localization

inline video (not only is this important, but it teaches us about how to combine Flutter with other kinds of inline views)

Firestore (which just launched)

Meanwhile, sorting Github Issues by "recently modified" is one way to get insight into what we're working on.

Also meanwhile, if you (or anyone) would like to use Flutter but are blocked by something, please let us know what you need (either via this mailing list, or by "thumbs up" an issue). We really appreciate feedback about what you and others need on the roadmap. And of course, we're open source and love to help people with PRs and contribute to our package ecosystem.

 

2) If possible, encourage community as well as internal teams to share their learnings and thought processes around Flutter. Will spark discussions, and increase overall learning. (Hint: blog).

Agreed. We definitely encourage nearly everyone we talk to to share their experiences via blogging. It's really helpful. And we're very appreciative when folks take the time. For example, this was just published: http://www.harrischris.com/article/flutter-initial-experience

 

3) Document best practices and recommended app architecture. It is ok for folks to deviate, but not having any guidance results in folks making bad choices, which will then be attributed to Flutter. (Hint: wiki).

We'd absolutely love to see our current Flutter users blog about this. As more and more people become familiar with Flutter, we expect some cool ideas to emerge. We're delighted to see sites like https://flutter.rocks appear :)

 

Technical
1) Initiate a real world project. Think what Camlistore did for Go.
2) Build and release components that would be required in any Flutter application. These components would logically be built while building the real world project. Please assume the world does not run on Firebase.
3) Complete existing components. For eg UserAccountsDrawerHeader is great, but half-baked. This would also logically follow from the real world project.

Please don't hesitate to file issues for the missing features of UserAccountsDrawerHeader. What makes it half-baked? (don't reply here, please open issues :)

 

4) Document the list of devices that Flutter will support, and ones that it will not. Moto G4 may be your lowest spec device, but that is of little comfort to know when the question is whether it will run on device X, X!=Moto G4. Ideally, iron out the perf issues so that "Janks on X" is close to eliminated.
5) Increase Android minsdkversion to 19 (92.2% of all devices) from 16 (98.8% of all devices). This API level requires ARMv7-A or above and most of these processors do support NEON instructions. This will help focus the effort on future, rather than the past. It may help with the previous point. And by the time Flutter hits v1, <19 would be irrelevant. Finally, only 19<= are receiving monthly AOSP security patches.

Thanks for the suggestion. I've opened https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/12439 and I'd love to hear what our community thinks about this.

 

Stretch
1) Get the Dart team to complete its HTTP/2 stack. Close to 3 years, and counting, does not reflect well. In those crunch technical discussions inside organizations, Dart/Flutter advocates have zero answers for issues like these. ("Google does not use Dart, look at their HTTP/2 stack. WIP, Experimental.").
2) Convince the Google Protobuf team to own Dart protobuf as well as gRPC implementations. Yes, Dart protobuf's implement proto2. proto3 is being worked upon since Jan. Apparently, only https://github.com/jakobr-google is working on HTTP/2, Proto3 and gRPC (bus-factor=1). It would be great if he could focus on HTTP/2, while the Protobuf team owns Dart protobuf and gRPC.

Thanks.

Regards,
ab

[1] - https://github.com/angular/material2#in-progress-planned-and-non-planned-features

 
 

Sent: Thursday, October 05, 2017 at 9:19 PM
From: "'Seth Ladd' via Flutter Dev" <flutt...@googlegroups.com>
To: "Aham Brahmasmi" <aham.br...@gmx.com>
Cc: "Flutter Dev" <flutt...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: Flutter and Future

Hello! Thanks for reaching out.
 

On Thu, Oct 5, 2017 at 3:27 AM, Aham Brahmasmi <aham.br...@gmx.com[mailto:aham.br...@gmx.com]> wrote:Hi,

It seems the Flutter team is planning its roadmap and engaging with external developers for prioritization. It would be great if the team could help the community understand the team's perspective on an important roadblock to Flutter's adoption.

Who are the primary customers of Flutter?
 
People with some programming experience (basic object-oriented) that want to build mobile apps for iOS and Android (either, or both).
 Are they Google's internal developer teams?
 
We have numerous Google internal teams using Flutter. The Ads organization is using Flutter for a few business critical projects. Apps that have launched from Google include a "store manager" app from Google Express, and app for our sales teams.
 Or all developer folks, irrespective of whether they are internal or external to Google?
 
Anyone that wants to build for mobile, and has some basic programming experience, should check out Flutter :)
 
Hope that helps!
 
Regards,
ab

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[Aham Brahmasmi]

Thanks Seth for the detailed response.

For the roadmap, having the broad areas known where Flutter is concentrating its effort helps a lot. If possible, perhaps we could have these broad areas in the README, will help folks who are encountering Flutter for the first time.

As regards to the blog, it would be great for Flutter to have its own blog. This will allow the team to share updates and important communication with everyone - similar to how AngularDart/Dart does it. Also, learnings and experiences of other teams with Flutter could be shared. Not necessary but good to have.

It is interesting to note that a lot of great stuff around Flutter has been curated here - https://github.com/Solido/awesome-flutter. May be Flutter's README could also link to that.