The problem with flutter is you never know when Google will stop investing in the product at any moment when the devs shift their priority.and let it die on the vine.

People love to say this but rarely provide concrete examples. Google has a habit of discontinuing unsuccessful services, not technologies like SDKs or whole programming languages.

It makes me think of Google Web Toolkit.

Not exactly abandoned - it seems to have been maintained for 10 years, although no stable release for the last couple of years.

It does feel like it would have been a dead end to get into though.

My worry with Flutter is the same - it won't get large enough adoption by other tech companies, and Google will move on to something else.

I think it'll still hang out as open source project. But will it get the large investment to make improvements as the various OSs change over the long time?

Hit me up on Google Wave and I'll explain it to you.

Angular.js is currently causing problems for me, as it's going to be unsupported in about a year.

The point is precisely that I have to do that.

GP asked for evidence of Google abandoning things, and Angular.js is exactly that.

Upgrading to an incompatible framework is not supporting the old one.

If you can "upgrade", then it's not incompatible.

Every major revision of software has breaking changes (or as you call them, "incompatibilities"), some more than others (see Python 2 -> 3).

That doesn't mean it's "abandoned". Google made major API changes and renamed it to better communicate that it's not some simple JS framework – calling that abandoned is disingenuous. It's only abandoned in-so-far as every old version of every software ever gets abandoned at some point.

Excuse me, I used imprecise language.

I cannot upgrade.

I have to port, due to the backwards-incompatible changes.

Those changes may well be for the better, but for those of us maintaining stable programs, porting means increasing risk of failure for no perceivable end user benefit.

Microsoft is much better at supporting old tools and software, at least historically.

Dated, but Google Gears?

AngularJS

Same feeling here. still waiting for that killer flutter app to convince me one can actually build a real app with decent latency in flutter

What do you mean by killer exactly?

Splice is now on flutter, including web. I'd say that is a pretty demanding app.

I checked out Splice and they are using Angular/Rails for their web app? Both builtwith and HTML source code for their marketing website and logged in app indicate this.

I watched their talk video [1] and they seemed to have only built an MVPish app using Flutter (ie, less than a year using it + a team of two devs). And it only seems to be for the desktop app?

Maybe I'm missing where they are using it on the web... but I wouldn't call this a huge buy in.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FcjPNKmyrlM

I mean an app with a large user base built in majority with flutter.

A killer app is something like Rails. Rails made Ruby popular, because it was so good that people who otherwise wouldn't have been interested in Ruby were willing to use it for the benefits they got from Rails.

I suppose Flutter is Dart's killer app, since you're comparing frameworks and languages. Rails is to Ruby as Flutter is to Dart, as it were. I suggest you give it a try. Personally, this felt like the "killer" feature to me, fully advanced animations that I'm not sure are possible on native widget based frameworks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCyoHclCqc8

Wouldn't Flutter be the killer app to Dart as Rails was to Ruby by your analogy?

Maybe? I don't know enough about it to say. I was just trying to clarify what a "killer app" was by using an example.