Software development: Is it still Flutter or already Flock? It's a fork!

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A fork of Google's Flutter has been released under the name Flock. The team responsible for Flock calls itself the Flutter Foundation on GitHub and aims to drive forward the further development of the framework.

Flutter is a framework for cross-platform development that is based on the Dart programming language, which was also developed by Google. It covers the web, the mobile operating systems Android and iOS as well as the desktop platforms Linux, Windows and macOS. The blog post on the launch of Flock complains that the core developers of Flutter cannot keep up with the wishes of those who develop applications with Flutter.

Too long waiting times for bug fixes and additions

According to the author of the blog post, requests for bugs and feature requests sometimes remain unanswered for years. He reports cases from his own experience in which he received feedback on a ticket when he had not worked on the project for a long time. As a result, he no longer remembered the details required for the bug fix.

The further development of the Linux, macOS and Windows desktop platforms suffered particularly from the bottlenecks. They were only in maintenance mode. Overall, the Flutter community is large enough to help with development. Experienced Flutter developers could contribute to the project as external contributors. After all, Flutter is an open source project.

Google's open source with a brake pad

So why don't those responsible at Flock simply participate in the further development of Flutter? According to their statements, there is a huge discrepancy between the open source project's self-portrayal and the reality: the Flutter team regularly advertises with many external contributions, but in reality communication with the Flutter team is difficult.

"While some developers have worked successfully with the Flutter team, many others have found the collaboration frustrating, if not impossible," the blog post states. A total of 1,500 external developers contributed to Flutter, but this also included people "who stopped by once to correct a typo in the Dart documentation".

Fork as a way out

Flock is now intended to remedy the situation. The team behind Flock refers to the fork as Flutter+, and it is explicitly not the aim to divide the Flutter community. The fork should always remain up to date with the latest version of Flutter and at the same time receive all important bug fixes and features requested by the community that the Flutter team either cannot or does not want to implement.

Testers and reviewers wanted

As a first step, the Flock team has mirrored Flutter. The repository on GitHub corresponds to the official Flutter repository at the start. The name Flutter will also be retained everywhere. In addition to the framework, the Flutter Foundation has forked the Flutter engine on GitHub. It has also launched repositories for the website and for tools.

The team is now inviting people to test it. The Flutter Foundation website shows a short documentation that guides you through the first steps of installing the Flutter Version Manager (FVM) tool and configuring projects for the fork.

The team is also looking for people interested in taking care of the review process. Finally, a number of key people are needed for different areas, including the tools and the different target platforms Android, iOS, macOS, Windows and Linux.

Ambitious, but questionable

The Flock team's plans are certainly ambitious, but whether the fork will manage to become interesting for business applications at some point is questionable. It could end up on the siding sooner than Flutter in the Google graveyard.

On Reddit, the reaction to the fork is almost universally negative, ranging from "it would be more helpful if you contributed to Flutter instead of forking it" to "complete waste of time" to "remind me to laugh about it in a year". Although the reactions to X are also largely critical, there is also positive feedback. The responses also include reactions that confirm the criticized shortcomings in communication with the Flutter team.

(rme)