State of Flutter 2026 - The Dev Newsletter

The tension between maturation and disruption defined Flutter's 2025. The Impeller transition locked in. iOS lost its Skia opt-out entirely, and Android API 29+ gained Impeller as default, eliminating the notorious shader compilation jank that plagued complex animations for years on those platforms. Skia remains on the web; on Android, API 29+ retains a deprecated manual opt-out to Skia, while devices below API 29 still default to Skia. … They cited unsolved performance issues and high compile-time costs, concluding they were "simply too far from solving the problems in a reasonable timeframe." The Very Good Ventures team called it "the right decision", praising the transparency despite disappointment. The Dart engineers reassured developers that they remain interested in metaprogramming long-term, but macros will not ship in the foreseeable future. … ... The project's stated grievances carried into 2025: an estimated 50 team members serving 1,000,000+ developers (a 1:20,000 ratio), slow PR review times, desktop platforms remaining "mostly stagnant," and serious bugs left unfixed. The community response split sharply. Critics called it "a complete waste of time" while supporters validated frustrations, particularly developers with enterprise experience dealing with slow issue resolution. Google responded by noting developers have forked Flutter "thousands of times" as normal open source practice. In 2025, the fork served less as a competitor and more as a pressure valve. It highlighted areas where official triage was too slow, often prompting the upstream team to address long-standing issues.