The Flock project has been introduced, which creates a fork of the user interface framework Flutter, developed by Google under the BSD license. The initiative to create this fork was taken by Matt Carroll, a former Google employee who was previously part of the Flutter development team. The reason for creating the fork is cited as the insufficient amount of resources that Google allocates to the project.
Google discontinued the expansion of the main Flutter development team in 2023, and in 2024, the company laid off some of its employees. According to the founders of the fork, the remaining Google developers and participants brought in through outsourcing are insufficient for the full development of the project. As a result, the lack of Flutter developers has led to a change in priorities and stagnation in the development of the framework for desktop platforms (development for 3 out of 6 supported platforms is currently limited to maintaining the existing code base). The shortage of developers also negatively impacts bug resolution—some error reports can remain unaddressed for years.
The Flock project does not intend to split the existing community and considers itself as 'Flutter+' — a synchronized fork of the main project that adds community-demanded improvements and bug fixes on top of the original Flutter, which the main Flutter development team at Google cannot or does not want to implement. The goal of the project is to accelerate development and expand the resources involved in development through a community that is not affiliated with Google. Currently, the content of the Flock repository fully corresponds to the Flutter repository.
Issues hindering direct interaction with the main Flutter team include a lack of time for core developers to review third-party changes, excessive time spent on various approvals, lengthy discussions over contentious decisions, and a lack of understanding of the challenges faced by application developers (the core team focuses on developing Flutter, not building applications based on it, which complicates understanding the urgency of resolving certain issues quickly). It is assumed that experienced Flutter application developers and those maintaining packages will be able to use the fork to promptly address arising issues and introduce desired innovations without waiting for responses from the main Flutter team or coordinating changes with them.
For its part, the main Flutter team will, as much as possible, align with its schedule and criteria to incorporate changes from the fork into the Flutter core. Given that Flock plans to involve a large number of participants in reviewing changes, the transfer of changes from the fork will enhance the quality of the Flutter codebase. This way, the community will not be limited by the capabilities of the main Flutter team and will be able to use more efficient and flexible development rules.
Source: opennet.ru
