Flutter is the future - but it needs our help!

Flutter accelerates your startup, empowers your designers, and shrinks your payroll in the enterprise. It's time for us to accelerate Flutter!

I'd like for you to help me, to help Flutter, to help you!

Flutter is unique

When Flutter hit version 1.0 in 2018, it was the only modern, declarative UI toolkit where your team could leverage the same set of skills to bring your product and your brand to multiple platforms. Today, even amidst a growing number of declarative UI toolkits, Flutter remains unique.

Where Apple's Swift UI is based on a mountain of closed-source proprietary code, Flutter is open source all the way down the stack - from the framework, to the engine, to the Dart programming language, itself. Where no mere mortal can possibly contribute to Android's Compose, Flutter accepts community contributions on a daily basis. Where .NET Maui is still trying to figure out its own identity, Flutter has followed a clear North star for the better part of a decade.

Flutter remains the most unique and valuable tool in your app team's tech stack.

But success with Flutter requires more than a great cross-platform foundation. It requires a great and plentiful open source ecosystem. It requires great education, and great community conversations. It requires community developers who bring their outside expertise into the Flutter framework through bug fixes and feature development.

The power of community

Flutter is a cross-platform powerhouse. But Flutter's real superpower is the Flutter community.

Your team can't maximize your Flutter value if your team can't maximize their Flutter knowledge. Google employs great engineers, but engineers are often the worst teachers. Google also employs a few good educators, but not enough. The Flutter community can provide a greater volume and diversity of education than Google could ever hope to provide.

Google's Flutter organization will probably always consist of the most capable Flutter contributors in the world. But there are plenty of capable contributors in the community. With a focus on community contributions, we can take the effective size of the Flutter and Dart teams from 150 internal contributors, to 1,500 community contributors, and beyond! We can accelerate Flutter's value creation to a level it's never seen before.

Flutter paints pixels, handles text input, and reacts to gestures - but your app does a lot more than that. Where does your app get other abilities, such as local databases, payment integrations, push notification integrations, Bluetooth integrations, and more? For the many requirements that sit outside the user interface, your team leverages Pub - the open source ecosystem for Flutter and Dart packages. These free, open source packages are so critical that a healthy Pub ecosystem is probably more important for your team's adoption of Flutter, than Flutter, itself.

The needs of teams like yours, who have adopted Flutter, are legion. But fortunately, there are millions of Flutter developers who use these tools, and therefore the world has a huge pool of customers who can help support the Flutter ecosystem.

I'm here today to ask you to help me build Flutter.

My work in the Flutter community

My name is Matt. I'm a former member of the Flutter team at Google. I left the Flutter organization in 2020 so that I could help a broader range of companies and developers adopt Flutter. Over the past few years, I've helped startups effectively integrate Flutter, including Mezzi , Daylight Computer Co. , and Ardley . I've also provided corporate training to help companies adopt Flutter, including Betterment .

Today I spend a lot of my time working on resources for the entire Flutter community.

• I run the Flutter Bounty Hunters where I've created over a dozen open source packages for Flutter and Dart, some with corporate backing. Expanding open source tools helps to ensure that when your team needs a new capability, it already exists, for free, in the open.
• I publish guides to help teams align on Flutter and Dart practices at Flutter Arbiter. Learning Flutter fundamentals is one thing, but your team needs to be able to put that knowledge to work, together.
• I co-host a weekly conversation on Twitter/X called Flutter Spaces. We introduce developers to topics and experiences they won't hear about anywhere else.
• I produce and publish educational Flutter videos across three YouTube channels: SuperDeclarative!, Flutter Bounty Hunters, and Built with Flutter. Today, most developers learn their craft through online videos than anywhere else.
• I created a place for the community to share and learn about shaders in Flutter at FlutterShaders.com. Shaders are a super power that can unleash your design team in ways previously thought impossible.

Through community work like this, we can drive more Flutter value to teams like yours than ever before.

But this work takes a lot of time and it's a huge cost for an individual like me to bear on my own. For that reason, I recently opened up sponsorships on GitHub. Each of us has something that we can bring to the table. In my case, that value comes in the form of Flutter education, package development, as well as working directly on Flutter, itself. For others, it's easier to simply send a few bucks over to people like me. That's where sponsorships come in. For those of you who appreciate the work that I do, I'd appreciate your monthly support to continue doing that work.

Help me, help Flutter

If you help me, I will literally help Flutter. For every 10 new monthly sponsors on GitHub, I will fix a bug in the Flutter framework. I used to work in the Flutter organization, so fixing framework bugs is well within my wheelhouse. Moreover, when I fix those bugs, I will record myself doing so, so that other developers in the community can learn how to fix Flutter bugs, too. This means that your contributions don't just contribute to bug fixes in Flutter, they also help other developers solve more bugs in the future!

Thanks to the first ten monthly sponsors, we've already fixed a framework bug!

As the number of monthly sponsors increases, I'll expand my direct Flutter efforts to include small feature development in the Flutter framework. After that, I'll propose and help implement large features and major framework and engine refactors.

If you'd like to learn more about my goal to turn my community work into a primary job, check out this blog post.

Let's make Flutter the best UI toolkit in the world, together!