Why Flutter isn’t Dead

Eric Seidel

Eric Seidel

Founder & CEO

6 min read

Why Flutter Isn’t Dead

For over 11 years now, my social media feed has been full of stories proclaiming “Flutter is dead.” I’m here to tell you it’s not, and why it won’t be.

Debating the longevity of anything with a modicum of popularity is a tried and true internet pastime. And to be sure, the foundational involvement of Google — which has a rich history of launching and sunsetting products with little fanfare — only makes the Flutter question spicier.

Beyond usual social media debates, questioning Flutter’s future helps fuel anxiety within app developers who are leaning toward adopting the open source framework. There is, of course, an enormous amount of money riding on multi-platform functionality for mobile apps today, and no organization can afford to get burned. So let’s take the question seriously, and pretend we’re Snopes-dot-com for a bit.

As with so many internet theories, the answer to this question is a lot less scandalous than the galaxy-brained hypothesizing that can surround it.

Flutter isn’t dying; just the opposite. If anything, we, as a community, are engaged in the sometimes unsexy work of solidifying Flutter’s place across businesses, both large and small, that care about portability, iteration speed, and long-term leverage.

Big bets on Flutter

The teams choosing Flutter today aren’t merely experimental hobbyists or young, crypto-funded startups with insatiable appetites for risk. Instead, we have long seen the world’s most established enterprises making large, public, and enthusiastic bets on Flutter.

If Flutter’s death was imminent, would premier global electronics players like LG be announcing heavy investments in the open-source UI toolkit? What about other global brand names like MGM or Whirlpool? Those major companies have joined other household names, such as Toyota and eBay, that are already benefitting from Flutter app development. These are real, mammoth, customer-facing brands backed by long-term roadmaps, compliance requirements, and significant business risk.

Meanwhile, Google continues to deploy Flutter widely across its businesses. Recently, the company’s CEO, Sundar Pichai, shared a demo built with Flutter. And Google has, for over-a-decade now, relied on Dart (the language from which Flutter’s built) exclusively for its ads platform (see for yourself by viewing the source of ads.google.com), which accounts for roughly 80% of the company’s annual revenue. It’s clear Dart and Flutter are both core to Google, and are here to stay.

Once again, these sorts of massive organizations don’t standardize on a framework they think is about to go the way of Chromecast or Google+. Migration costs, retraining, and platform risk alone make that unlikely.

And these companies wouldn’t be moving toward Flutter if they weren’t true believers. As LG noted in its announcement of a new app it decided to rewrite in Flutter, “Without any optimization whatsoever, our Flutter rewrite launched twice as fast as our original app, consumed less runtime memory, and felt more responsive and playful to use.” That experiment sparked the LG team to include Flutter-built app versions in its 2025 televisions globally, and promised ever broader usage in 2026.

So some of today’s leading dev teams are bought in, and more are joining the party.

Growing adoption

Flutter’s usage numbers don’t suggest a withering ecosystem either. According to Google, nearly 30% of all new free iOS apps were powered by Flutter in 2024. That figure is especially notable because it spans companies of all sizes, including first-time indie developers and established enterprises, optimizing their mobile strategy.

Flutter app development is increasingly becoming the default choice for teams that want to move fast without multiplying engineering costs. Organizations are learning that not every app needs deeply customized native rendering and, in many cases, that’s only going to become a maintenance headache as time progresses.

Instead, teams just need consistency, reliability, and the option to ship across platforms without rewriting everything from scratch.

In that context, Flutter’s value proposition remains second to none.

The framework is still rapidly evolving

Another common misconception is that Flutter’s evolution is stagnating. As frameworks mature, it is common to look like things are slowing down. But at the same time looking at the release cadence tells a different story. In 2025, Flutter shipped four releases, alongside major Dart revisions. And these weren’t minor updates either. These releases included performance improvements, language refinements, and tooling upgrades aimed squarely at production-scale teams.

We’ve also seen meaningful structural progress, such as the ongoing effort to split Material (Android design system) and Cupertino (Apple’s design). That work matters because it makes Flutter less monolithic and more modular and adaptable across platforms, which has become more important as Flutter has found wider success beyond iOS and Android.

On the AI front, progress remains strong. Flutter has a dedicated Generative AI effort, as well as official MCP servers for Flutter and Dart. Flutter has also found wider success within Google’s AI efforts. This mirrors a broader industry trend: AI works better as augmentation than as a rewrite of core UI architecture.

Where Flutter still needs to improve

Any technology requires constant evolution to remain relevant. Flutter is no exception. And those of us at Shorebird and the wider community are pushing Flutter forward.

Developers tell us they would like shareable iteration loops (like Vercel-like previews) for Flutter. Tooling in this area is improving, but it’s not completely there yet.

There’s also strong demand for the ability to target new operating systems without forking. As new devices and form factors emerge, Flutter’s promise of portability will be tested.

Finally, sustained ecosystem expansion matters. Flutter’s longevity will rely not just on Google’s releases, but on third-party innovation filling the gaps faster than core teams can. And we’re seeing strong promise there:

And at Shorebird, with Code Push, we’re currently tackling one of Flutter’s most painful production gaps: post-release updates and patching. In beta, we also have a new product, Shorebird CI, which is a zero-config continuous integration system. And there’s a lot more Flutter functionality coming on the horizon from us, so stay tuned.

Flutter’s real advantage

Flutter isn’t on the rise because it’s trendy to experiment with a “what if” future of true multi-platform app development. It’s winning because it reduces repetition. The future is shaping up to contain more screens, devices, and platforms than ever. Writing the same app multiple times for each single format is increasingly hard to justify — and that’s not just from a time, money, or even a dev perspective; it also improves the end user’s experience.

Flutter app development offers a pragmatic alternative: one codebase, consistent behavior, predictable performance, and a growing set of tools to support production teams.

So no, Flutter isn’t dead. For developers, it’s just starting to be born out in real apps for real companies that handle real workflows and ship real releases daily.

Shorebird empowers Flutter teams to focus on building great apps by handling the hard parts like zero-config CI or instant over-the-air updates.
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