On September 20, 2024, I was honored to deliver a keynote address to the attendees of Fluttercon USA in New York City. As someone who has been involved in Flutter since its early days, my life has been radically altered by the emergence of this great technology. The objective of the presentation was to inspire the community to align our priorities and efforts to lend our collective strength to driving Flutter’s growth.
As a primary call to action to the community, I propose that we begin more productive dialogue to set objectives for the community via a community-driven commercial roadmap.
Keynote Recap
The Flutter community has achieved remarkable success, but there's still untapped potential waiting to be unlocked. To truly thrive, we must move beyond the notion that Flutter's fate rests solely with Google. It's time to embrace a community-driven approach, where we collectively shape the future of this powerful framework.
One persistent concern that hinders Flutter's broader adoption is the fear that Google might abandon it. We strongly believe this fear is unfounded, especially given Google's significant investment and the widespread use of Flutter within their own products. Nonetheless, it's up to us, the community, to dispel this notion by lending our collective strength to complement Google’s efforts. We must showcase Flutter's strength, independence, and the vastness of its impact.
To guide our collective efforts and ensure Flutter's continued growth, we need a clear roadmap for the ongoing development of Flutter’s economic growth. We need a "Commercial Roadmap," focusing on the business aspects of the Flutter ecosystem, that will complement the existing technical Flutter project roadmap and outline strategic initiatives to foster community engagement, drive market adoption, and increase commercial outcomes.
At Very Good Ventures, we're aiming to start this conversation by providing an example to illustrate how companies can directly influence Flutter’s commercial success. We are open-sourcing our own Flutter Commercial Roadmap for 2024-2025. This roadmap serves as a starting point for community discussions, highlighting our priorities and inviting others to share their own.
Our roadmap is centered around four key goals:
- Community: We're committed to fostering a stronger, more engaged community. This involves organizing forums, championing the development of a community-driven commercial roadmap, and actively seeking feedback on our own initiatives.
- Confidence: We want to empower new Flutter teams with the knowledge and tools they need to succeed. We'll continue investing in open-source software, engage in community forums to offer guidance, and provide comprehensive resources like our "Very Good Engineering" website.
- Commerce: We recognize the importance of corporate involvement in the Flutter ecosystem. We'll encourage our clients to share their success stories, offer pro bono marketing support to large enterprises, and actively sponsor Flutter conferences.
- Capability: We're dedicated to showcasing Flutter's full potential as a multi-platform framework. We'll prioritize client projects that demonstrate novel use cases, invest in content highlighting non-mobile applications, and develop open-source demos that push the boundaries of what's possible with Flutter.
The future of Flutter is in our hands. It's time to step up, share our priorities, contribute to open-source projects, and collaborate on the development of a shared community roadmap. Together, we can make Flutter the "everywhere framework" and ensure its continued growth and success for years to come.
How to Get Involved
- Express your interest and intent in getting involved in the development of a community-driven commercial roadmap. Contact us or comment on this first issue.
- Create and share your own set of priorities or roadmap. Ours can be found here: https://github.com/VGVentures/flutter-commercial-roadmap
- Contact us if you’re interested in discussing or collaborating on any of the items in our roadmap.
- Stay tuned for more content on this topic—Fluttercon will be releasing the video of the talk session soon!
- If you are a large enterprise working with Flutter interested in pro bono marketing support to tell your Flutter story, please get in touch.
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