You have to look at what teams at Google are using Flutter. Any dev tool Google officially releases tends to be funded by some product that actually likes/uses it.
There are a lot of teams using it, which is why it's still getting so much support. If you see Google apps moving away from it, then it's time to start looking for an alternative.
It's also why AngularDart still exists and is getting updated. There are large projects that use it, so they will keep supporting it.
The fact Pay and Ads both use, along with Youtube Create even, is a pretty good sign because if they have a non-trivial codebase of flutter/dart app(s) then killing it would impact all those teams who are doing important work. I've debated trying flutter/dart a few times and this makes me feel more willing to try it.
Ads is the reason Dart is still around, they saved the team after the project folded, after migrating from GWT to AngularDart, they weren't into doing yet another rewrite.
> Ads is the reason Dart is still around, they saved the team after the project folded,
Wasn't it Analytics which had Dart? But I do remember something about Ads saving it.
> they weren't into doing yet another rewrite.
It all depends on politics within the company. For example: youtube was hastily rewritten using alpha/beta versions of Polymer targeting Custom Elements v0. The moment they did that v0 was deprecated.
So within next 4 years they rewrote Youtube again with Polymer version targeting Custom Elements v1. The moment they did that, Polymer was deprecated and replaced with lit.
Even though they haven't rewritten Youtube, they've now spent time integrating Wiz, an internal Google framework (that also got merged with Angular).
The costs of rewrites don't matter at Google as much as promotions.
I assumed Flutter is open source; if they fix kill it off, is there a reason to not to expect the community to fork and maintain it? Presumably they'd have to rebrand it without Google giving permission for the name, but that alone doesn't seem like enough to stop it from existing in some form.
The base ROI of Flutter to Google isn't all that clear because it's relatively complex to maintain. Worse, it requires maintaining Dart, which appears to be a dead-end language in terms of adoption.
If Flutter and Dart were donated to the community, they would most likely slowly die because no one outside of Google gets enough benefit from them to justify maintaining an entire programming language.
It's worse. Flutter actually works against google's own interests. Webpages that render text in a canvas are not as easily indexable as webpages that emit html. It's funny too because the same is true for sites made with flutter. They aren't SEO friendly
You could suggest using AI to OCR the canvas but even that would be subpar because most sites that use HTML provide multiple screens worth of info but sites that render to a canvas render only what's visible. The rest of the data is internal. You'd not only need the AI to successfully OCR the text, you'd need it to interact with the page get it to render what's not currently displayed.
Accessibility interfaces are ideal for this situation, allowing an LLM to interact with a GUI strictly through text. Unfortunately, they're often an afterthought in implementations.
> is there a reason to not to expect the community to fork and maintain it?
I think you should ask the opposite question instead, and this goes for any project that is corporate "owned"/sponsored like Flutter: why should we expect the community to maintain it if the company abandons it?
Are there any non-Googlers with commit access to the project? Do non-Googlers comprise a decent percentage of contributions? If not, the bar goes up quite a bit for a fork, or for a "peaceful handoff" of the existing project.
