I know that having many open-source packages and plugins is exciting and makes the Flutter community stronger, but the reality I see in production projects is that so many critical plugins we need are poorly maintained or even not maintained at all, which often forces us to fork libraries, look for other options, or create our own.
In my opinion, it would be great to have the option for developers to sell their packages on pub.dev. This way, I believe that many more production-quality, sustainable packages could be created, similar to what exists in the gaming development industry (Unreal and Unity marketplaces).
Is that even possible? What do you think about the current state of the available plugins?
It’s actually already possible to do so today. You just don’t get any protection if people use it without paying.
Biggest problem is that Dart does not support a binary distribution format for packages and that we are used to jump into the source of any package
In .Net you can select different package servers and some paid packages host their own nugget servers.
So Dart would need to be able to pull packages from more than one pub. @mraleph might know how difficult this would be.
Some are already doing that like syncfusion packages and DCM, Picovoice, and surely others…
I don’t know If I would pay for a plugin or package especially since there are so many alternatives on the net. I’d rather pay a bounty or donate to get an issue or feature done. An org on GitHub that hosts popular packages with trusted maintainers would be great.
Some are already doing that like syncfusion packages and DCM, Picovoice, and surely others…
Yes, but as far as I know there is no way to track who uses their paid solutions and the payment/subscription needs to be done separately, which adds more friction for both the client and library creator.
I don’t know If I would pay for a plugin or package especially since there are so many alternatives on the net.
As an individual developer I probably wouldn’t pay as well, but that’s a necessity for enterprise apps to have reliable well maintained libraries. For example, in my company we already had problems with:
Local DB (previously based on the deprecated Hive)
Importing images/videos from Gallery (both image_picker and file_picker have many problems)
Media compression (no reliable solution at all)
Custom camera (Camerawesome has many issues and the official camera doesn’t have everything we need)
And the list goes on. As a solution, we are having to implement what we need natively (i.e: creating our own plugins), but that’s much more expensive than paying a dedicated team which is maintaining a reliable library for thousands of other companies. Moreover, thinking of developer experience, we should be dedicating our time with our business solutions instead of reinventing the wheel creating native wrappers for things that could be readily available.
You could argue that we could make those plugins we create open source and help the community, but our resources are restricted to make it work for our specific usecases, so there is no time left to make it flexible enough for a public solution or for maintaining issues not related to our application.
I’d rather pay a bounty or donate to get an issue or feature done
I’ve tried in the past in a previous company. The price charged for the developer in the occasion was thousands of dolars! Wouldn’t it better to pay a few dolars to have it good and maintained out of the box?
An org on GitHub that hosts popular packages with trusted maintainers would be great.
Fluter Favorites should work for that, but the amount of packages are still very limited. Maybe because there isn’t enough good libraries out there?
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