Project Status & Community Maintainership Request

[dbebawy]

Summary

This project has been inactive since May 2023. There are currently 15 open PRs (including critical dependency updates) and 19 open issues with no maintainer activity. I'd like to open a discussion about the project's future and request the opportunity to become a community maintainer.

Current State

Metric	Status
Last commit	May 8, 2023 (~2 years ago)
Open PRs	15 (oldest: 18+ months)
Open issues	19
2022 Roadmap	Stalled — Core/Auth stable, others incomplete

Notable unmerged work:

• PR chore: Update dependencies and fix tests #131 by @davidmartos96 — Dependency updates, Melos 3 migration (confirmed working by multiple users)
• Multiple PRs addressing compatibility with latest FlutterFire packages

Questions for Maintainers

1. Is there any official plan for this project's future? Is it being sunset, or just on hold?
2. Would you consider adding community maintainers? Several of us depend on this project and are willing to help.
3. If official maintainership isn't possible, would you support a community fork? We could continue development under a separate organization while giving credit to the original work.

What I'm Offering

I'm willing to help maintain this project. Specifically, I commit to:

• Reviewing and merging community PRs (starting with the 15 pending)
• Keeping dependencies updated with upstream FlutterFire
• Responding to issues in a timely manner
• Following existing contribution guidelines and code standards
• Coordinating with other interested maintainers

Background: I maintain One Coptic Library, a Flutter app that needs Firebase desktop support for macOS, Windows, and Linux. I've signed the Google CLA.

Potential Paths Forward

Option	Pros	Cons
Add community maintainers	Keeps official namespace, continuity	Requires Google/Invertase approval
Transfer to community org	Full control, fresh start	Loses FirebaseExtended branding
Community fork	Can proceed independently	Package name conflicts, fragmentation
Archive project	Clarity for users	Leaves gap in Flutter desktop ecosystem

Call for Interested Contributors

If you're interested in helping maintain this project, please comment below. Having multiple maintainers would make this sustainable long-term.

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cc: @Salakar @pr-Mais @nilsreichardt @TimWhiting @davidmartos96 @Ehesp @lesnitsky @ruicraveiro @britannio

I've also reached out to several of you directly. I understand this is a FirebaseExtended project and decisions may require Google approval. Happy to discuss any requirements or concerns.

[nilsreichardt]

Hi @dbebawy, cool that you are motivated to become a maintainer. Unfortunately, I'm not a maintainer and can't help with this request :/

[TimWhiting]

@dbebawy I've contributed in the past as well, and care about improving desktop app development experience, but I'm not part of the FirebaseExtended team (I'm not a maintainer), and have can't help with your request.

[Ehesp]

Hi folks,

Thanks for the ping and details. I can provide some context here, although just be mindful I'm not a Googler.

This repo was originally on the invertase organization, and started as an experiment to understand the complexity of building a Dart-only "FlutterFire". At the time, FlutterFire did not support any desktop platform, thus this repo was a "two birds one stone" experiment.

In 2021, Canoncial announced they were supporting Flutter within Ubuntu, enabling devs to build Ubuntu apps with Flutter. They wanted to Firebase support (at least, core modules such as Auth) and so reached out to us to see if the project could be further developed. We agreed a form of sponsorship with Canonical back in 2021 (and the word sponsorship is deliberate, there was no contract/expectation/timelines and relative to the development effort involved, a nominal amount).

We got Authentication into a working state with core features (sign in, state management etc) but it was far from complete. In 2022, Tim helped bring Functions support.

Over the next few years, a number of things happened:

1. Firebase improved (and are continuing to do so) the support for C++ SDK, which comes with Windows support for FlutterFire. This is still being actively developed.
2. Improvements were made to the FlutterFire iOS side of things to support MacOS.
3. Canonical stopped sponsoring the project - and with the significant amount of work required to keep this project (alongside FlutterFire) maintained it wasn't sustainable.
4. The project was moved from invertase -> firebaseextended - this organization states it's for "projects that are not officially staffed by Googlers but may be of use to Firebase developers.".
5. Priorities have massively shifted in the past couple of years, primarily due to the AI bubble, where investments are in new products (e.g. AI Logic, Data Connect). It'd be a significant investment to go down the Dart-only path - with little reward.

Given this project was to support "desktop", that's really now just Linux. FlutterFire (which is in active development) supports Desktop in the way of MacOS and Windows already - however in most cases, limited support, which is being slowly improved.

This essentially leaves Linux, and from a very high-level perspective there doesn't seem to be that much of a demand (happy to be proven wrong), given this repository has zero activity.

Given the massive amount of work involved to not only develop, but also maintain a Dart-only implementation of the Firebase SDKs when a well-established and maintained SDK (FlutterFire) already exists just doesn't seem make sense to me.

That basically leaves me with the view of; for this project (or the overall Dart-only SDK plan) to be successful and sustainable, it needs the backing of Google, and they'd need to commit to the Dart-only strategy... and I honestly don't see that happening.

My views only, not Googles.

[TimWhiting]

Hi @Ehesp thanks for the information.

It looks like the C++ SDK is now available on Linux as well. (I'm not sure to what degree it is supported, but they don't call out any specific libraries for specific platforms, so I'm assuming that it has the same support as all desktop platforms now).
https://firebase.google.com/docs/cpp/setup?platform=ios#libraries-desktop

Do you know if there any other changes needed for the flutter plugins to support Linux, other than making an entry for Linux in the pubspec.yaml?

[Ehesp]

That's a fair point, I'll bring this up with the team and Google to see what sort of level Linux support is at - I don't think it's quite as straightforwards as Windows.

Do you know if there any other changes needed for the flutter plugins to support Linux, other than making an entry for Linux in the pubspec.yaml?

Not sure myself but will dig into it - but I suspect like most things, there's always a catch :D