Google's Flutter UI Toolkit Forked As Flock

Google's open-source and cross-platform Flutter UI toolkit has been forked by community developers as Flock.

Flock is now a fork of the Flutter toolkit that is intended to be a "Flutter+" for continuing to be part of the Flutter developer community but to be innovating faster and not be held up by the ways of Google engineers managing the project.The Flock developers believe that Google engineers aren't putting enough focus into the desktop version of the toolkit, that Google isn't investing enough developers into the project, and that community members trying to upstream changes can be challenging.

Yes, it's a bit ironic to carry out a fork to deal with an under-staffed Flutter development team. But the reasoning here is that upstream Flutter has limited review labor, making changes by the community to upstream Flutter can be very time consuming, and a described "communication monoculture" among the Google developers. So the hope by the Flock founders is that the community can lead to more developers stepping up for code review and helping out the toolkit without the overhead of dealing with Google.

Flock plans to add important bug fixes and "popular community features" for which the Flutter team can't or won't implement within Flutter.

Those wishing to learn more about this new Flock fork of Flutter can read the inaugural project announcement on FlutterFoundation.dev.