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by gumby271·3d ago·view on hn ↗
How are they limping? Flutter has completely replaced it's rendering engine across all platforms and they're building out major window management support on desktop platforms.

At some point there's just not much exciting new stuff to add. Flutter is a nice stable platform, I'd highly recommend it.

2 comments
> Flutter has completely replaced it's rendering engine across all platforms

And that new rendering engine is also why apps like Immich are unable to show HDR photos. Apple & Google both pushed broad support for that a couple years ago, with things like Ultra HDR and subsequently ISO 21496-1.

Meanwhile Flutter still doesn't really have wide gamut support https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/189155

Of course they need to prioritize where to spend resources, like any project, but Flutter also doesn't seem to be on any critical path for fancy headlining new features, either.

Right, but, nobody uses it. So what's the point for Google?
>but, nobody uses it.

I used to work at ByteDance and they alone employed I think more than 800 Flutter Devs. Douyin uses Flutter (the Chinese version of TikTok), Grab and Ebay use it, Alibaba and Baidu did too. Toyota and Volkswagen I think both use Flutter. Nubank I think is also a flutter app and they alone have like one hundred million some users.

With the popularity in the Chinese ecosystem alone there's gotta be a billion plus people using flutter.

I've made a huge critic towards Flutter in another comment of mine, but adoption isn't it: the biggest bank in Brazil, with 135 million clients, is a digital bank whose sole interface is their Flutter app. They are different regarding tech choices (they use Clojure on the backend too), but I think it's a huge testament of how far along Flutter adoption has come.

Also, Google dogfoods it quite a bit.

Nubank also uses clojure and adoption is still a big issue.
Third-party analysis (https://appfigures.com/top-sdks/development/all) has Flutter used in 16% of iOS apps and 24% of Android apps (free)

Archive link: https://archive.is/IIUaj

I really don't understand how/why people deny reality so hard when it comes to Flutter. Reminds me a bit of years ago when people were still scoffing at the idea of anyone actually adopting JavaScript to write web servers with while Node.js was very obviously eating up the market.

It eats the market indeed, and also presents business opportunities for folks like myself, jumping in writing C++ addons, or completely replacing it with Java, .NET, Go, Rust,....
All the more reason why it's important to have an accurate read on the market! I for one also know a few people who've made a pretty penny writing native integrations for React Native and now Flutter apps.
Interesting, so Nubank is a heavy Flutter user?
Is that true though? I'm reading HN on an app built using Flutter. I had no idea until recently, so I would assume more apps could use it without my knowledge.

I understand it's limitations vs native apps, but there's quite a few cases where it really doesn't matter.

The biggest one for me is always the fear it will be abandoned. Pretty much goes for any cross platform app framework though.

The creator of flutter was on here saying that 1/3 of all apps on the App Store use it. That seems to be a lot more than “nobody”.
Google AdSense uses it.
Been using it for six years with fairly high success: https://stockevents.app
That’s awesome how has the experience been between shipping for both iOS and Android.

Gonna check out the app

Thank you! It's been an excellent experience over the years really. Always easy to ship and always easy to keep up with flutter improvements which have come consistently.