Flutter Fork Designed To Give Developers ‘Release Valve’

Matt Carroll has seen the ugly side of open source — the side that reacts without understanding and forces false positives while ignoring real problems, the former Google senior engineer and Flutter developer said.

He’s been accused of wrongdoings that range from not talking to the Flutter team to even trying to destroy the cross-platform framework, he said. What led to all of this?

Carroll and Jesse Ezell forked Flutter to create Flock, an alternative that he and Ezell say will remain as close to Flutter as possible while serving as a “release valve” until Flutter can catch up to various fixes requested by the community but as yet unresolved.

What he wants is for the community to hear him out and give Flock a chance. Too many in the community got his intentions completely wrong, he contended in a recent series of podcasts.

A Few Facts

For the record, this is not the first time Flutter has been forked. When asked about the creation of Flock, a Google spokesperson pointed out Flutter has been forked thousands of times over the years, he said, adding that “it’s a normal procedure in open source for many reasons (such as working on experimental ideas or tweaking a project for a specific use case).”

Then there’s this: Carroll has repeatedly said that Flock is not actually a fork meant to create a totally separate offering.

“We’re not here to diverge from Flutter,” Carroll told Viktor Lidholt, the founder of Serverpod, a Dart-based server solution, during a podcast. “We really mean it when we say there are people who need things that aren’t being served. So if you can be served, if, as you said, every bug you file gets merged, excellent. I hope you continue to file with Flutter, and I hope they continue to fix your bugs.”

Filing an issue with Flutter will be a requirement before Flock will even consider the request, he added.

The Why Behind the Fork

A quick response from Flutter is not everyone’s experience, Carroll told Lidholt.

Carroll contributes to Super Editor, an open source document editing and reading toolkit for Flutter. He said the Super Editor group has filed dozens of tickets that impact paying customers and it’s rare that the issues are resolved, he said.

The Flutter consultant also talked with clients who’ve experienced similar problems.

“One really important thing for people in the Flutter community to fully understand is that your good experience does not preclude someone else’s bad experience,” Carroll told Lidholt. “And me being a voice for the people who are having bad experiences is not a slight against those of you who had good experiences.”

In a Flutter Spaces podcast, Carroll and Ezell discussed the fork. Ezell acknowledged that people did not like the idea of the fork but added, “We’ve been living in a reality for a few years now where we’ve had to fork just so that our app stops crashing.”

“For the company out there that’s filing and begging and they can’t seem to get their fix in or their feature in, we want a community pressure release valve, a place for them to go when the Flutter team is not the answer.”
– Matt Carroll, Flutter consultant and co-creator of Flock

“At first, we tried to work with the Flutter team, and we tried to file issues, but we were never able to really get traction,” Ezell said. “In the meantime, our app was crashing in production, so at some point, we tried harder and harder to make better descriptions for bugs and try to get the team to care about them, but we were never really successful.”

Flock can act as a “pressure release valve” for those whose issues aren’t being addressed, he said.

“For the company out there that’s filing and begging, and they can’t seem to get their fix in or their feature in, we want a community pressure release valve, a place for them to go when the Flutter team is not the answer,” he said.

The idea is that the Flock team can create fixes or provide a path for fixes until Flutter can catch up or add the bug correction to the core offering, he said.

Carroll and Ezell also plan to create a set of tools that will make it easier for people to create their own forks. They’re calling it Nest.

The New Stack asked Google if Flutter has a backlog of fixes it hasn’t responded to, and they were told that Google is continuing to invest in Flutter and its community. The spokesperson pointed to Flutter’s recent “Flutter in Production” event and the release of Flutter 3.27.

The Backlash

Carroll outlined most of this in a blog post announcing the fork. But the message got lost in translation, or maybe it never mattered, because a backlash hit — so much so that Carroll expressed concerns about this article, referring The New Stack to the Flock blog and the two podcasts where he tried to clarify Flock’s intentions.

One criticism Carroll has faced is that he should have talked with Flutter before forking it. But Carroll told Lidholt that he has been sending them letters for years.

”If they wanted to work with me, we’d be working together,” he told Lidholt. “I have never turned away a call; I’ve never turned away an email. I’ve never ignored one. I’ve never taken any step to not work with that team. But they sure have made it a hell for me to try to work with them.”

Carroll took issues with Lidholt’s comment that this felt “a little bit like a provocation towards the Flutter community.”

“The viewpoint is not new, but this, no, I could not disagree more with that,” he said. ”This community has convinced itself that pointing out uncomfortable truths is akin to being a bully…. I completely disagree with that. If you have an emotional reaction to someone else’s description of a problem, that is not on the person describing the problem.”

What’s Next

At this point, Flock is still trying to attract leads to help manage the project, as well as contributors. Carroll told TNS via LinkedIn that about 40 people have expressed interest, and he hopes to get some forward momentum going for the framework.