Flutter Revolution

As Flutter is in a winning position as a development platform and we are gearing up our investment in Flutter technology, I wanted to reflect a bit on what we’ve seen happening.

I’ve been in a management role for the last few years, so I didn't run into the Flutter platform the usual way. Of course, I’ve heard the talks from developers at the coffee machine, but to me that sounded like the usual Monday morning “he, there’s a new platform/package that is sooo much better than everything we had last week”.

No, it’s my Operating System Fetish (yes, it’s a very complicated condition) that brought my attention to Flutter. This interest in Operating Systems makes me browse the Linux kernel mailing list on a regular basis. Nothing more relaxing then some fine engineers debating over very complicated low-level stuff :-)

Anyways, over the last few years Google has had a ‘secret’ OS project called Fuchsia. Next to Linux I frequently browse it’s repositories as well (I know, super weird) and it is a very exciting project. Mainly because it rather fundamentally differs from everything else that exists at this time (which in itself is food for another blog, because it is really cool!).

At some point, I was wondering how end-user applications could be written for this new OS and after some investigation, I found out that one of the solutions for this is … Flutter! Now I was interested enough and wanted to learn more about it. At that point in time, we started Baseflow and for the first big mobile projects we did, we picked Flutter. Scary, because at that time it was beta and we all know what ‘beta’ means inside Google ;-)

Fast forward to today where basically Flutter is our default choice for mobile projects these days. Our developers (and designers!) love it, development time has shortened and the results are beautiful, high performing apps!

But besides the great technology itself is something else that is equally as impressive: the way the Flutter product is being handled from a product management perspective. Creating great technology is one thing, but managing a product when it scales and is being used by a large crowd of critical developers is another. I’ve seen multiple “no, we’re not gonna do that” answers to feature requests and nothing is being rushed. The recent ‘nullable’ feature is a nice example of that: it is being worked on for more than a year but the end result is worth it.

It is this (rare) combination of technical excitement and meticulous attention to detail that makes us very enthusiastic about Flutter and we have full confidence in its bright future. That’s also being reflected in the effort we put in Open Source Flutter plugins (we are the creators of some of Flutters most popular plugins) and we’re going to increase that effort over the next year.

And yes, it would be awesome if someone contacts us for building a Flutter app specifically for Fuchsia ;-)