One of developers who worked on the Flutter team at Google has created an open-source form of the framework. Matt Carroll says Flock will be "Flutter+", will remain constantly up to date with Flutter, and lock will add important bug fixes and popular community features, which the Flutter team either can't, or won't implement.

Flutter is Google's open source mobile UI framework that can be used to create native interfaces on iOS and Android. It was created as a combination of Google's Dart programming language and a runtime environment that is referred to as an app engine in Flutter.

The driving force behind the new fork for Carroll was what he describes as an unworkable ratio of developers for Flutter at Google compared to the reach of Flutter worldwide. Carroll estimates that Google's Flutter team is around 50 strong, with at least a million Flutter developers worldwide.

Carroll says that:

"due to company-wide issues at Google, the Flutter team's head count was frozen circa 2023, and then earlier in 2024 we learned of a small number of layoffs. It seems that the team may now be expanding again, through outsourcing, but we're not likely to see the Flutter team double or quadruple its size any time soon."

He also says that Google's corporate re-focus on AI caused the Flutter team to de-prioritize all desktop platforms:

"As we speak, the Flutter team is in maintenance mode for 3 of its 6 supported platforms. Desktop is quite possibly the greatest untapped value for Flutter, but it's now mostly stagnant."

Carroll left the Flutter team in 2020 and works as a Flutter consultant. He has also developed open source packages for Flutter and Dart for areas he says aren't well provided for by the core language.

Carroll's hope is that the worldwide community of Flutter developers will get involved with the fork. He says that by forking Flutter, the community gets to decide what gets merged, gaining opportunities including a much larger pull request review team than the Flutter team so achieving faster review times. He plans to recruit pull request reviewers who are "ready to facilitate contributions, instead of merely tolerating them", which is what he says happens at Google.

The hope is that as bug fixes and features are added to Flock, the Flutter team can choose to add those to Flutter, on their schedule:

"The community will no longer be limited by the Flutter team's availability, nor will the community need to beg the Flutter team to please accept a change. The Flutter team can use Flock's solutions, or not, but all Flock users will have access to them, eliminating your company and team's urgency and desperation."

Flock's first step will be to mirror Flutter, then to automatically build and upload the engine, and make those engine binaries available to Flock users. Carroll is asking Flutter developers to try building their apps with Flock, saying they shouldn't see any difference between Flock and Flutter, and can configure Flock with a tiny Flutter Version Manager (FVM) configuration.

Carroll's move has met with a measure of support among Flutter developers, many of whom have also felt frustrated by Google's focus on AI and other languages such as Kotlin. We'll be keeping an eye on Flock's progress.

More Information

Flock Website

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