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Hixie's Natural Log

2023-11-22 04:32 UTC The Future is Flutter

Despite my departure from Google, I am not leaving Flutter — the great thing about open source and open standards is that the product and the employer are orthogonal. I've had three employers in my career, and in all three cases when I left my employer I continued my job. With Netscape I was a member of the team before my internship, during my internship, and after my internship. With Opera Software, I joined while working on standards, kept working on standards, and left while working on the same standard that I then continued to work on at Google. So this is not a new thing for me.

Flutter is amazingly successful. It's already the leading mobile app development framework, and I think we're close to having the table stakes required to make it the obvious default choice for desktop development as well (it's already there for some use cases). It's increasingly used in embedded scenarios. And Flutter is extremely well positioned to be the first truly usable Wasm framework as the web transitions to the more powerful, lower-level Wasm-based model over the next few years.

In the coming month I will prepare our roadmap for 2024 (in consultation with the rest of the team). For me personally, however, my focus will probably be on fixing fun bugs, and on making progress on blankcanvas, my library for making it easy to build custom widget sets. I also expect I will be continuing to work on package:rfw, the UI-push library, as there has been increasing interest from teams using Flutter and wanting ways to present custom interfaces determined by the server at runtime without requiring the user to download an updated app.