> I mean, I hate to be flippant about it, but honestly the biggest factors in Google's funding of Flutter in the last 5 years have been COVID-19 and Russia attacking Ukraine, along with the subsequent market instability and inflation.

Very fair

> Well that's fine but I can't afford to have someone comb through 600,000 apps and make a call for each one on whether it's a hobby or not. :-)

> We don't know how people wrote their apps. Also, someone can do a single Udemy course and then develop a killer app that makes millions of dollars. Is that a hobby?

> I assure you plenty of commercial projects fail in exactly this way. ~90% of startups fail.

Here I what I was getting at was todo examples being submitted, or some single tutorial chat client, someone can come out and make flappy birds of course, I taught kids in the past and some went on to publish their apps as encouragement from their parent. Nothing wrong with it, just don't see it paying the bills was my point. That was the totality of my point I think....

> The value Google wants is ad dollars, Android users, and reduced internal development costs.

I was trying to get at if a billion "hobby" devs don't drive any of this it's all a zero, thus my interest in that number.

> My job is working on Flutter, and I am not concerned for my job. If that's not enough, there's not much more I can tell you.

This is the best answer yet

> But again, the people who would work on, say, HTTP2, and the people who would work on the Game Toolkit, are entirely different people and the skills aren't interchangeable. Engineers aren't commodities you can just move around at will. People specialize, have interests, commitments are made, etc.

Totally agree, it seemed more to me people were hired for this vs expanding elsewhere.

> The paltry funds we spent on the Game Toolkit work literally could not have been used for iOS work. That's just not how things work.

Seems like it didn't matter though so fair enough

> I would also say that "no matter what a survey says" is a very subjective way to run things.

> The two are not mutually exclusive. The Google team working on Flutter is currently focusing on growing the user base _by_ improving the polish (specifically around developer experience).

I could be 100% wrong but perception is real, after I wrote this I was sent links to other people on twitter lamenting the same growth into other sectors while mobile was not polished. I know in the yearly survey it asked about professional use, not sure if that gets more weight?

> These numbers have been public for some time, for what it's worth.

I tried googling this so many times, SEO of dev shops and blogs obscure whatever is out there on this subject.

> The total Flutter developer base is much bigger than MAUs

This is a deeper convo, if I have to update some wordpress php once every 6 months am I really part of the php/wordpress developer base? Idk, it's semantics I suppose, I have my opinion that the base is people who deal with the language / framework on a nearly weekly basis. My point in being interested in this number related to "Google wants is ad dollars", and the assumption they connect.

> I actually have no idea where Remy works, where is it?

Remmy works for Invertase who make all the Firebase packages, he and they do a great job imho.

The last pieces were on iOS, here is the issue that was filed: https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/110431 but honestly if you have full time iOS users ask them, they have to know, it's impossible to miss, this is not the only issue, but it requires more quantifying. To be totally frank as a dev with many iOS and Android test phones, Flutter scrolling feels like Android scrolling on an iPhone.