Is Google Killing Flutter? Here's What's Really Happening in 2025

Every few months, we have this same conversation about Google potentially abandoning Flutter. But this time, there's actually some evidence worth discussing.

The Concerning Signs

Some key Flutter developers have moved to other teams. Brandon DeRosier, the developer behind Impeller (Flutter's GPU rendering engine), left for the Android XR team back in August. If you check GitHub, several core contributors aren't as active anymore. People have been tracking commits to the master branch, and the numbers don't look great if you're the worrying type. The core team's contributions appear significantly lower compared to previous years.

However, some developers have also joined the engine team. So it's not just departures—there's movement in both directions.

The Full Picture Matters

Flutter isn't just one repository. The core team manages multiple repositories, including the packages repository. They even took over Google Fonts recently from the Material team. Maybe people are just looking in the wrong places?

This might simply be what happens when a product matures. Do you track commits for every framework you use? Has anyone checked whether React Native developers are switching teams? Flutter still has roughly 4x the commits of React Native on a typical day.

A Lesson from the Real World

As a mature product, Flutter doesn't need as many developers anymore. I once worked for a company that developed software for the government. The government is the best client—they don't spend their own money, but taxpayers' money. Despite that, after several years of development, the government (represented by a middle-aged woman) appeared in our office asking questions: "The project is mature, so why does it still cost this much?" "What does this person do?" "And him?" Layoffs followed. But the project is still alive more than 10 years later.

What I'm saying is this: if Google laid off half of the Flutter engineers tomorrow, it wouldn't necessarily mean much for the framework's future.

The Current State of Development

Yes, development has slowed somewhat. Google I/O had essentially zero Flutter sessions this year, down from 27 a few years ago. That's definitely not encouraging.

But there are still approximately 100 commits per week. Last month had 446 commits from 95 different authors.

Sure, if you exclude automatic commits and bug fixes, maybe there are only 8 meaningful contributions per working day. But that's not insignificant.

Non-Google contributors now outnumber Google employees working on Flutter. These people don't receive salaries from Google, so they're not going anywhere. And dozens of packages are published on pub.dev every single day. Not all of them are top quality, but the ecosystem remains active.

Why Google Won't Kill Flutter

Google is fundamentally an advertising sales and data collection company. That's where their revenue comes from. Everything else supports that core business.

They acquired Android to maintain their position in the mobile market. Flutter exists so they're not locked out of iOS development. And iOS is massive—Google pays Apple twenty billion dollars annually just to be the default search engine on iPhones. Twenty. Billion.

Flutter gives them a presence in apps running on iOS beyond their own products. As long as mobile phones remain important, Flutter isn't going anywhere.

The Open Source Safety Net

Flutter is open source. That matters more than most people realize.

Even if Google decided to eliminate all Dart/Flutter team members at some point, Flutter would survive.

Numerous companies have products or services that depend on Flutter. They would establish a Flutter Foundation and keep it alive at minimum.

Consider Framework7 (a UI framework for Cordova apps). It's obviously much simpler and smaller than Flutter, but it was created and maintained by a single developer.

I don't know exactly how many developers are needed to maintain Flutter, but probably far fewer than the current size of the Dart and Flutter teams.

Flutter Is Already Good Enough

Flutter is already excellent. It's a truly cross-platform framework with the best developer experience available. For my own projects, I need much less from Flutter than it already offers. So the fact (or assumption) that development has slowed doesn't worry me.

It's not keeping pace with Material Expressive? I'm not a Material design enthusiast anyway. And if you need something from it tomorrow, just check pub.dev—there's probably someone who already implemented that feature.

The situation with Apple's liquid glass is slightly different. It would be nice to have built-in liquid glass icons, or better yet, some LiquidGlassContainer that would magically transform everything inside to look like liquid glass.

The Bottom Line

Is development slowing down? Yes, probably. Are some team members moving to other projects like Kotlin Multiplatform? It appears so.

But Google completely abandoning Flutter? I don't see it happening anytime soon. The business case still exists. And with all the money and resources already invested, abandoning it would be foolish even for Google.

And Flutter has sufficient momentum to survive without Google if it ever came to that.