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Re:Flutter Release Preview 2 by pier25 on Wednesday September 19, 2018 @11:14PM (#18029492)
Google has abandoned products, but has it abandoned technologies?
Re:Flutter Release Preview 2 by stickfigure on Wednesday September 19, 2018 @11:57PM (#18029653)
Was Wave a product or a technology? Both, I guess.

That said, Wave doesn't seem comparable. Maybe GWT? If so, I'd be perfectly happy if Flutter has the lifespan of GWT, which is some 12 years old now and still viable (if perhaps a little crusty). 12 years is a phenomenal run for a piece of frontend tech.

Re:Flutter Release Preview 2 by benatkin on Thursday September 20, 2018 @12:13AM (#18029739)
I'm not completely sure what the difference between a technology and a product is, but I think it was a product, because it was SaaS with only one provider and closed source until the shutdown announcement, and very few developers were integrating with it. Only when the shutdown was announced did they open source it, and it became more of a technology than a product.

I think the Android userspace might count as a technology that's been shut down. When Android first came out, it looked a lot like a mobile counterpart to a Linux distro with Gnome or KDE, with built in simple open source apps, like music, photos, downloads, and notes (now Keep). Now all these apps are littered with tie-ins to Google, and Samsung and Huawei have gone off and developed alternatives because it's annoying to use these apps without fully buying into Google (same to a lesser extent for Maps and Chrome). This might be a stretch though, and besides this I don't know of any Google technology that was popular and useful and got shut down in a way that reminds me of Google Reader.

Re:Flutter Release Preview 2 by Apocryphon on Thursday September 20, 2018 @12:24AM (#18029782)
Fabric?
Re:Flutter Release Preview 2 by nevi-me on Thursday September 20, 2018 @12:39AM (#18029827)
Fabric had it coming. Twitter sold it because they no longer wanted to focus on it.

When Google bought it, it felt a lot like buying the market. What Fabric tools are you going to miss, which Firebase does not have/support?

It doesn't make sense for Google to maintain two platforms that do the same thing indefinitely.

Twitter didn't have viable alternatives. They could have sold it to someone else, but who?

- Apple? Forget about Android support - Facebook? Not interested, they killed Parse - Google? Made sense, because the value of Fabric was the number of devs using it.

Fabric Crash Analytics was a strong product, why not bring in the team that developed it to gradually bring its features into Firebase?

Fabric is not a good example; it wasn't "abandoned" as developers were given alternatives. It also works better for us developers, because now I don't have to bundle a Fabric SDK and a Firebase SDK.

Lastly, given that Twitter is shutting down access to third-parties to their API, the value of Fabric's integration with Twitter might have dwindled for some people.

Re:Flutter Release Preview 2 by benatkin on Thursday September 20, 2018 @12:36AM (#18029817)
I'm not too familiar with Fabric, but that sounds like it would count, because it was a technology that external developers were building on that got shut down without a clear migration path.
Re:Flutter Release Preview 2 by woolvalley on Thursday September 20, 2018 @02:05AM (#18030123)
UIKit has been pretty much been the same thing for about 10+ years.

There are additions and tweaks here and there, but you can still make table views inside navigation controllers inside tab bar controllers using frame based layout with near identical code you would use in iOS 2.

Re:Flutter Release Preview 2 by pjmlp on Thursday September 20, 2018 @02:58AM (#18030307)
Every year at Google IO Android APIs get partially rebooted, the NDK already got three build systems, Android Studio is being rebuilt from version to version.

Good luck to those that jump today into Android without the background how it grew up since the early days.

Documentation is outdated and many of the still documented best practices have long been replaced by Medium posts and SO answers about the new best practices that replaced them.

https://medium.com/@steve.yegge/who-will-steal-android-from-...

Re:Flutter Release Preview 2 by Apocryphon on Thursday September 20, 2018 @03:08AM (#18030343)
Android development resembles web development?
Re:Flutter Release Preview 2 by pjmlp on Thursday September 20, 2018 @03:31AM (#18030430)
Yes, but they still manage to be more pleasant to work with than building UIs with <div> and CSS, while making it work across any device with something that resembles a browser on them.