Sony Engineer Talks Up Using Flutter + Wayland For Their Embedded Interfaces

A Sony engineer confirmed at this week's Embedded Linux Conference Europe that the company has begun using the Flutter toolkit atop Wayland as their means of developing user-interfaces on embedded systems.

Hidenori Matsubayashi of Sony talked at ELCE 2020 about their evaluation of different GUI toolkits for embedded use and ultimately how they fell for Flutter and Wayland. They came to that decision when evaluating the likes of Electron, Qt, GTK, WebKit/Chromium with WebView, and the many other options out there.

Their design requirements were needing to be able to make "beautiful" user interfaces, support easy development, exhibit low CPU and RAM requirements, work across display servers and software stacks, and the toolkit must allow use within proprietary software.

Sony found that Flutter fit their requirements in allowing them to build beautiful interfaces for embedded systems while having plentiful software support across platforms. Flutter is BSD licensed, has few dependencies, and is fast as their main highlights.

Given the increasing number of embedded/SoC vendors focusing on Wayland support over other display stacks, Sony is indeed making use of Flutter atop Wayland.

Sony currently is making use of the Weston compositor and running the Flutter embedded shell. Sony does plan on contributing more to the Linux build of Google's Flutter library moving forward.

More details on Sony's usage of Flutter and Wayland via this slide deck from ELCE 2020.