Written by JaYoung Lee and Tao Dong

The Flutter UX research team ran the 7th quarterly survey in November of 2019 and received 6,343 responses. Thank you for participating — each and every response matters. As always, we are back to share our findings.

First and foremost, we found that 93% of respondents are positively satisfied with Flutter, meeting our 2019 goal of maintaining 90% or higher satisfaction rate! We’re delighted that even as Flutter’s active developer base grows, we’ve continued to make developers happy.

Here are the top 5 issues mentioned in the responses. For more information, please read the detailed report below.

Cupertino widgets: About 20% of all developers are (1) considering or using Cupertino widgets (Flutter’s iOS-styled widgets) for production apps and (2) think that it is very or extremely important to replicate the iOS look and feel with the Cupertino widgets. GitHub issues: Only 15% of the survey respondents have filed at least one issue on the flutter/flutter repo GitHub, and only 23% have voted on existing issues. CI/CD: 20% of respondents have used Continuous Integration and Delivery (CI/CD) services for their Flutter projects, and the top three preferred services were: Codemagic, GitLab CI/CD, and Jenkins. 60% to 74% of developers were positively satisfied with these services. Hot reload: 70% of respondents think that hot reload is working as expected more than 90% of the time. When hot reload doesn’t work, 23% of developers seldom or never know why. Dart String API: 17% of developers have either heard about or encountered an issue with unicode characters that require two bytes to express, such as emojis, diacriticals, etc. About 10% of those who experienced the issue could not release their app, because of it.

Findings from each topic were shared with the Flutter/Dart team for future planning. Please see the sections below for further details.

Cupertino widgets

In previous surveys, the Cupertino widget library (which enables the iOS design language in Flutter) have scored lower for satisfaction compared to other subsystems. Only around 70% of developers were very satisfied or somewhat satisfied with Cupertino widgets, while over 80% of developers are positively satisfied with other subsystems, such as Material widgets or the core framework. Note that the satisfaction rate was calculated after excluding respondents who selected “I have no experience with this.”

Cupertino widgets have lower satisfaction rate than other Flutter subsystems

We also noticed that many respondents were indifferent about Cupertino widgets (20% were neither satisfied nor dissatisfied), even when excluding 41% of all respondents who selected “I have no experience with Cupertino widgets.”