The Flock project is presented, which is a fork of the Flutter user interface framework developed by Google under a BSD license. The initiator of the fork was Matt Carroll, a former Google employee who was previously part of the Flutter development team. The reason for creating the fork is the insufficient amount of resources that Google invests in the project.
The expansion of the Flutter core development team was stopped by Google in 2023, and in 2024 the company laid off some employees. According to the founders of the fork, the remaining developers and outsourced participants at Google are not enough for the full development of the project. As a result, the shortage of Flutter developers led to a change in priorities and stagnation in the development of the framework for desktop platforms (development for 3 of the 6 supported platforms is now limited to work related to maintaining the existing code base). The shortage of developers also negatively affects the elimination of problems - some error messages can remain in the queue for years.
The Flock project does not intend to split the established community and views itself as “Flutter+” — a fork synchronized with the main project that adds community-requested improvements and bug fixes on top of the main Flutter that the main Flutter development team at Google cannot or does not want to implement. The stated goal of the project is to accelerate development and expand the resources involved in development at the expense of the community not associated with Google. At the moment, the content of the Flock repository is completely consistent with the Flutter repository.
The problems that hinder direct interaction with the Flutter core team include the lack of time for core developers to review third-party changes, huge time costs for various approvals, delays in discussions of controversial decisions, and a lack of understanding of the problems of application developers (the core team is developing Flutter, not developing applications based on it, which hinders the understanding of the importance of quickly fixing some problems). It is assumed that experienced Flutter application developers and package maintainers will be able to use the fork to promptly fix emerging problems and add desired innovations, without waiting for a reaction from the Flutter core team and without coordinating changes with them.
For its part, the Flutter core team will be able to migrate changes from the fork to Flutter as best it can, according to its own schedule and criteria. Given that Flock is planning to attract a large number of contributors who review changes, migrating changes from the fork will help improve the quality of the Flutter codebase. The community will not be limited by the capabilities of the Flutter core team, and will be able to use more efficient and flexible development rules.
Source: opennet.ru
