Matt Carroll, a Flutter developer and consultant who was formerly on the Flutter team at Google, has forked the cross-platform framework to create Flock. He lamented that Google’s focus on AI has negatively impacted Flutter development, and that the team is in “maintenance mode for three of its six supported platforms.”

Caroll left Google in 2020 to become a Flutter consultant – also setting up a site called Flutter Bounty Hunters – to create open source packages for Flutter and Dart to fill perceived missing pieces.

In a post Carroll expressed dissatisfaction with the way Google is managing this popular framework:

• Although Flutter is open source, according to Carroll many developers have found communication with the Flutter team “frustrating, if not unworkable,” with long delays. This has resulted, he claimed, in few regular contributors from the community.
• Carroll believes that Google’s Flutter team numbers about 50 people, with the head count frozen in 2023 and then “a small number of layoffs” this year.
• Google’s corporate focus on AI has, Carroll claimed, “caused the Flutter team to de-prioritize all desktop platforms.” In particular, Flutter for Mac, Windows and Linux is “now mostly stagnant,” he claimed.
• Serious bugs are left unfixed for too long, Carroll said, causing large customers to stop using Flutter in some instances.

The goal of Flock is not to replace Google Flutter, but to add bug fixes and new features – in the hope that the Google team will add them “on their schedule.” Carroll is hoping to recruit a Flutter tool lead as well as a lead for each supported platform: Android, iOS, Mac, Linux and Windows (no mention of web). For now though, Flock is just a mirror of Flutter.

Whether or not Flock succeeds, its appearance is not the first indication that Google has reduced its investment in the framework. At Google’s I/O developer event in May, the ad giant highlighted Kotlin over Flutter, with official support for Kotlin multiplatform.

It is also worth noting that Tim Sneath, who joined Google from Microsoft in order to be product lead on Flutter, moved to Apple in June 2023.

There is some support in the Flutter community for Carroll’s views. “Flutter is the best thing that happened to UI development since Qt,” said one, “and the frustration described in the post is felt by many CTOs and developers.” 

Others are less sure of the framework’s value though. The long-standing debate regarding native widgets versus drawing the user interface on a canvas (as Flutter does) is still going strong. 

Anxiety about Flutter’s development and future also illustrates the difference between an open source project maintained by a large corporation which may reduce its investment, versus independent projects supported by a foundation or similar body.