Readit NewsBetween this phenomenon and the refusal of many to close tabs in their browsers, I can't help but wonder if a huge percentage of the populace have never heard of or used Bookmarks on their web browsers before.
For Flutter, the most visually obvious thing (aside from usually using Material Design) is that its animation curves are all totally different from those of UIKit/SwiftUI and interact with gestures differently. The Cupertino theme is a poor facsimile of UIKit and lands squarely in the uncanny valley, which is arguably worse than Material Design. Flutter on iOS also tends to hitch where UIKit/SwiftUI don’t.
Disclaimer: used to work on some of these animations
Shepherding these patches is no fun when you have your own changes to work on that are more important to the team.
We did something similar, by creating an external fork where changes could be tried out by the community, without necessarily being accepted into the internal version.
I think a fork could work if there was enough external momentum, but even 20 people working full time would actually be pretty good for an open source project. How many developers will this fork attract? The fork would need to attract other businesses who can put people on it.
One downside is that the code isn't tested against google3. Sometimes you find actual bugs that way.
Edit: reading more closely, the complaint doesn't seem to be that patches weren't reviewed, but rather that bug reports weren't investigated. That's definitely something outside developers could do more of, and seems a lot easier than forking?
disclaimer: my team runs said infrastructure
For me its so weird they ditched google/skia to develop Impeller in Dart from scratch in the first place. If skia was not ready they could move just 1-2 developers to Skia team to collaborate with them. Now they want to even write their own 3d rendering lib based on Impeller (flutter_gpu, flutter_scene) even thought google has already mature 3d engine in C++ (google/filament). For me from the outside looks like "not envented in our team" syndrome. We are now in funny situation that react native has react-native-skia and react-native-filament and Flutter teams reinvents the wheels.
I doubt google have even 50 flutter devs in their team. You can easily estimate by checking github pulse:
https://github.com/flutter/flutter/pulse/monthly
https://github.com/flutter/engine/pulse/monthly
Also take into account inflated commits by CI bots: engine-flutter-autoroll, skia-flutter-autoroll, auto-submit[bot], fluttergithubbot, flutter-pub-roller-bot
Since Elon is so interested in that model, if xAI had Claude's capabilities, they would surely go with that angle
Aristotle did say in Politics IV that appointing public office by lottery, drawing from the real public, is more democratic (power to the people) than elections, which is an oligarchic exercise.