But they also fund JetBrains, Jetpack Compose, and KMP. It feels like the company threw their support behind Kotlin a long while ago on mobile, but internal struggles keep the others limping along. Compose UI tooling no longer requires viewing on device.
Only because it was cheaper to migrate Android to Kotlin instead of Dart. JetBrains needs Google more than Google needs JetBrains.
There are several clues that the reasons were more political than monetary, including some former team members like Jake Warton remarks on Dart.
Note that Dart or Flutter are nowhere to be found on Android developer documentation.
At the time Google went with Kotlin, Flutter was still very new and a much bigger step away from Java given Kotlin already back then was seamlessly integrated with Java and compiled to JVM bytecode.
Re:What's New in Flutter 3.47
by invalidname on Wednesday August 12, 2026 @09:59PM
(#49280994)
You're thinking of Google as a single top down company. It isn't. Think of it as an anarchy of warlords where each pulls the strings and management doesn't really know what's going on.
Flutter made a lot of sense during the Oracle lawsuit when Google needed a way to show Oracle that it can pivot from Java. Now it no longer makes sense but the inertia is too deep.
My guess is that flutter is sold internally through the Huawei support as a leg within China.
Android used to be its own kingdom separate from rest of Google. And maybe still is.
I’ve had good experiences with Flutter too. It’s actually much easier to build a performant macOS app with flutter than with SwiftUI.
> It’s actually much easier to build a performant macOS app with flutter than with SwiftUI.
Got any case studies?
Just my own apps. Getting good performance out of SwiftUI on Mac is quite difficult. Loads of footguns.
And yet I dont see any Flutter macos apps at all.
Re:What's New in Flutter 3.47
by formvoltron on Wednesday August 12, 2026 @09:04PM
(#49280607)
Curious how you feel about KMP and Kotlin Compose.
I think Dart and Flutter are very overlooked. The language has completely changed since its release, its statically typed, has null safety, enums, and pattern matching, and is very simple and easy to read. It has fast compilation and a ui framework with hot reload. It's as fast as Js on v8 while using less memory and has the overlooked feature of having very fast, almost 0 overhead, ffi.
I think the importance of good ffi is underrated for these ui languages. For reference, everyone that's using electron has to run two node processes doing ipc over a websocket connection. That's going to waste an absurd number of cpu cycles and memory when you are passing messages around when your app is basically a ui for a cli.