Flutter Blog
medium.com/flutter · Company blog · on HN since 2019
The Flutter team's official blog on Medium, with release notes and announcements for Google's cross-platform UI toolkit.
What HN saysHN links it for release announcements, Linux and web support, and accessibility posts, mostly while debating how well Flutter works on desktop and web.
68HN people shared it
20linked it in comments
83stories submitted
356story points
1 year agolast shared
2019people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1What's New in Flutter 2.56 people · 12 points · first shared 2021 · 1 comments on HN
- 2What’s New in Flutter 24 people · 16 points · first shared 2021 · discussion on HN
- 3Flutter Linux Alpha with Canonical4 people · 14 points · first shared 2020 · 4 comments on HN
- 4What’s New in Flutter 2.84 people · 8 points · first shared 2021 · 1 comments on HN
- 5Accessibility in Flutter on the Web4 people · 3 points · first shared 2024 · discussion on HN
- 6Announcing Flutter 1.223 people · 24 points · first shared 2020 · discussion on HN
- 7Announcing Flutter 1.173 people · 17 points · first shared 2020 · discussion on HN
- 8What’s New in Flutter 3.133 people · 3 points · first shared 2023 · discussion on HN
- 9Flutter 2.102 people · 15 points · first shared 2022 · discussion on HN
- 10What's New in Flutter 3.222 people · 14 points · first shared 2024 · 3 comments on HN
- 11Flutter and Desktop Apps2 people · 10 points · first shared 2020 · discussion on HN
- 12Announcing Flutter 1.12: What a Year2 people · 10 points · first shared 2019 · discussion on HN
- 13Announcing Flutter 2.2 at Google I/O 20212 people · 10 points · first shared 2021 · 1 comments on HN
- 14Announcing Flutter 1.72 people · 10 points · first shared 2019 · 1 comments on HN
- 15Introducing Flutter 32 people · 8 points · first shared 2022 · discussion on HN
What HN people wrote when they linked it
yagodragon · 2020-12-16
Flutter[0] is also very promising. It's like Qt but simpler and more productive. I've already used it in mobile apps and it's great.
[0] https://medium.com/flutter/announcing-flutter-linux-alpha-with-canonic…
devxpy · 2020-07-09
There's an experiment from a flutter core dev -- running flutter on a raspberry pi without any desktop environment.
https://medium.com/flutter/flutter-on-raspberry-pi-mostly-from-scratch…
A DE written in flutter sounds like a great accelerator/toy project for making flutter desktop polished and ready for the masses.
throwaway032023 · 2025-05-21
“that's declined so precipitously”
That sounds hyperbolic and unserious.
https://medium.com/flutter/whats-new-in-flutter-3-32-40c1086bab6e
Flutter is doing well on Desktop. Is it going to be the same experience as writing c# on windows or swift on OSX? No. Will it work? Yes.
Note the ffi/jni gen announcement. This has been in works for a long time. FFI has been stable for awhile. The generators are new.
serial_dev · 2024-12-31
> Anyone know what went wrong in there?
Knowing, I don’t know, could be related though…
Google Earth uses Flutter on web, too, which is in my opinion, the platform where Flutter is giving its users the worst experience.
Though the root cause of the bug could also be non-Flutter related, because in Google Earth’s case, Flutter mainly just wraps the interesting bits (maps stuff in c++???) with a unified UI skin.
And does Google break Firefox all the time on purpose? Good question…
https://medium.com/flutter/extreme-ui-adaptability-in-flutter-how-goog…
peutetre · 2024-10-27
If you're not going to read the documentation, read a blog post:
https://medium.com/flutter/accessibility-in-flutter-on-the-web-51bfc55…
robin_reala · 2024-05-28
Call me back when Flutter can have an always-on accessibility system that doesn’t tank performance[1] (self-admitted!) and we can talk about potentially being ready for use in a production system.
[1] https://medium.com/flutter/accessibility-in-flutter-on-the-web-51bfc55…
chris37879 · 2024-05-19
That's actually how Flutter works now if you enable web accessibility, and it does take a lot of work, and come with a performance cost: https://medium.com/flutter/accessibility-in-flutter-on-the-web-51bfc55…
wiseowise · 2023-12-30
Right, they're going to kill 6 year old project that they're actively investing in (https://medium.com/flutter/whats-new-in-flutter-3-13-479d9b11df4d#4c90… and use to write their projects (https://flutter.dev/showcase/google-classroom, https://flutter.dev/showcase/google-pay).
I don't like Google and Flutter as much as the next guy, but at least use some arguments instead of parroting "Le GoOgLe bad" meme.
timsneath · 2022-02-25
Certainly Google sees value in Flutter, otherwise we wouldn’t fund it to the tune of 100+ engineers. But our motivations are less malevolent than you might assume. Here is our strategy doc, which we publish in the open (not many products can say that, I think): https://medium.com/flutter/flutter-in-2022-strategy-and-roadmap-8c5eaf…
999900000999 · 2022-01-03
>"Dart-only Firebase Initialization"
https://medium.com/flutter/whats-new-in-flutter-2-8-d085b763d181#:~:te…
This is by far the most important news for me, having to initialize Firebase in HTML was not fun
ozten · 2021-05-12
Accessibility notes: “ we generate a second DOM tree parallel to the DOM tree used as the RenderObject tree and translate the flags, actions, labels, and other semantic properties into ARIA.”
https://medium.com/flutter/going-deeper-with-flutters-web-support-66d7…
CodeArtisan · 2021-03-07
Since the releases of Flutter and Fuschia, the development of Dart went tenfolds. Devs post performance improvement reports from time to time.
https://medium.com/flutter/flutter-performance-updates-in-the-first-ha…
https://medium.com/flutter/flutter-performance-updates-in-2019-4c17093…
cbolton · 2021-03-04
I think you're missing the point of touch mode: mouse and touch actually work fine in both modes. The touch mode is just there to demonstrate how Flutter adapts the layout depending on the target modality: see how the controls get larger when you select touch mode.
The Medium post[1] about Web support explains some adaptations they made for Desktop browser, including:
We also increased the default content density, because mouse pointers support a tighter density than touch devices.
I expect that in a "real" app the default mode is adapted automatically based on the device type.
[1] https://medium.com/flutter/flutter-web-support-hits-the-stable-milesto…
mhoad · 2020-10-28
There is indeed an official path for full linux support or at least in the sense that is outlined here https://medium.com/flutter/announcing-flutter-linux-alpha-with-canonic…
wstrange · 2020-08-26
According to [1], there are more than 90,000 Flutter apps on the play store, growing at over 10,000 per month. Now to be fair many of these are low quality throw away apps, but there some significant apps including Hamilton, and Google Stadia.
In addition, flutter runs in a whole bunch of places, including native desktop apps and of course Fuschia.
I am coming to the opposite conclusion. Flutter is a massive hit - and I think Google is smart enough to know they have a a winner on their hands. Flutter isn't going anywhere.
[1] https://medium.com/flutter/announcing-flutter-1-20-2aaf68c89c75
exacube · 2020-05-13
You might be misinformed; according to https://medium.com/flutter/hummingbird-building-flutter-for-the-web-e6… Flutter for Web uses HTML & CSS where it can, and falls back to Canvas where it can't.
Flutter for Web is still on Beta, so lets see where it lands. Today, it seems to implement some PWA practices and lazyloading to try and get some performance.
sebe · 2019-06-10
Flutter draws every pixel to screen, supports Tween and Physics-based animations. There are some short widget of the week videos in their docs.
https://flutter.dev/docs/development/ui/animations
Some examples of Flutter apps.
There is this community list of apps https://itsallwidgets.com/
Also the Flutter team posted the results of their competition to create apps in 5K or less
https://medium.com/flutter/the-flutter-create-winners-are-40980f2d20b3
Lionga · 2022-10-05
Don't think so they are heavily invested in it. As Flutter PM wrote here on HN:
The reason you should feel confident to use Flutter is because it's strongly in our business interest to invest in it. Over 600,000 apps in the Play Store alone are already written using Flutter, to say nothing of the countless apps for iOS, Windows, macOS, Linux and web. The list includes big brands like Alibaba, BMW, eBay, and SHEIN. Neither Google as a whole, nor Android in particular would be better off if Flutter didn't continue to flourish.
Aside from that, there are thousands of engineers at Google who use Dart and Flutter internally to build a wide variety of apps. There are many millions of lines of code written that power everything from Ads to our internal CRM system. Google wouldn't be better off if we had to throw all that code away and start over.
Lastly, Flutter is very successful. It has a developer base of several million, is growing quickly, and developers tell us it makes them more productive (https://medium.com/flutter/does-flutter-boost-developer-prod...). Happy developers are a prerequisite for a wide variety of other Google APIs and services, so we have a vested interest in continuing that.
Even if it weren't for Google, there are more contributors to Flutter from outside Google than there are Flutter team employees. Those contributors include big companies like Samsung, Canonical and Sony, as well as prolific individual developers like @a14n (https://github.com/a14n).
pjmlp · 2021-05-19
It has the relevance that many Google teams prefer it to Kotlin, hence internal politics.
Jetpack Compose is clearly a counter movement from Android team.
https://medium.com/flutter/announcing-flutter-2-2-at-google-i-o-2021-9…
https://www.press.bmwgroup.com/global/article/detail/T0328610EN/the-my…
https://devclass.com/2020/10/29/sony-takes-a-flutter-on-embedded-syste…
https://stadia.dev/intl/es_es/blog/how-flutter-helped-us-make-stadia-c…
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/surface-duo/flutter-dual-screen-foldabl…
mleonhard · 2021-09-14
I also worked at Google. Now I'm using Google's Flutter to build a mobile app. I worry that Flutter will stagnate and become unusable on mobile before I can afford native rewrites. Flutter's mobile support is already stagnating. Flutter Team has left many mobile features half-implemented: iOS widgets [0], dark mode [1], location [2], and camera [3]. They even hired an outside company to work on Flutter mobile extensions [4]. Flutter's engineers have moved on to web and desktop. Others have written [5] about this.
Beware depending on any Google tool for your business.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/FlutterDev/comments/d51o4w/were_the_flutter_t…
[1] https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/80860
[2] https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/31453
[3] https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/70751
[4] https://medium.com/flutter/flutter-package-ecosystem-update-d50645f2d7…
[5] https://www.reddit.com/r/FlutterDev/comments/ju2zza/flutters_biggest_p…