Discussion - Increase the pace of this library development

[Shailevy]

@tobrun I'm sorry for opening an issue for this, feel free to delete it if you don't think it's OK to discuss this here

Mapbox has a fantastic product, but as more and more companies are migrating existing projects to flutter it's becoming very clearer and clearer how far this library has t go before it's it can actually be used to migrate projects using Mapbox to flutter. Too many features are missing, pull requests sometimes get stalled, the roadmap isn't clear and the project needs higher levels of leadership.
While I'm sure everyone appreciates the hard and amazing work being done here it's still becoming a bottleneck.

So regarding the first note in the project readme: "Please note that this project is community-driven and is not an official Mapbox product"

What can we do to put pressure on Mapbox to take this project under its wing and allocate resources for it?
Or what can we do to strengthen the community contribution here?

I can say that on a personal note for me (as an example) it isn't very appealing to spend time on pull requests because of a few main reasons:

1. Efforts don't seem to be in-sync and more of a single developer adding what he needs
2. Lack of public roadmap/schedule or clarity on being done now
3. Any feature I would want to add I will need to implement it within my own skills (example: Android) and then "hope" for an iOS and Web developer to join me and add the other platforms support
4. Pull requests take a long time to be approved as far as I can observe

[tobrun]

@tobrun I'm sorry for opening an issue for this, feel to delete it if you don't think it's OK to discuss this here

First of all, thank you for opening an issue! All discussions are accepted. This is an open project for anyone to contribute.

What can we do to put pressure on Mapbox to take this project under its wing and allocate resources for it?
Or what can we do to strengthen the community contribution here?

While I do work for Mapbox at this time, I'm unable to spend time on it during my day to day job. I'm only able to once in a while in spare time to look at the project and move it along. Lately a lot has been changing in my private life which makes these check-ins/contributions more rare. I tried pulling in a couple of collaborators to not become a bottleneck in this project but I do feel I am at this point in time. I'm happy to empower anyone wanting to become more involved with this project. The best way to make flutter an official product is to just ask them. We have been getting a couple of these requests along these lines but the more voices the better.

Efforts don't seem to be in-sync and more of a single developer adding what he needs

That is exactly what the current state of the project is. I'm sad about it but that is all I personally can offer.

Lack of public roadmap/schedule or clarity on being done now

I do think we are in a state where we support a limited API where you can leverage the power of Mapbox Studio and Styles to include a map into your flutter project. You can't however rely on some powerful concepts as runtime and data driven styling where you change map appearance on the fly.

If I find some time to get back into the project, I will put effort in outlining deficiencies and where the future of this project could go.

Any feature I would want to add I will need to implement it within my own skills (example: Android) and then "hope" for an iOS and Web developer to join me and add the other platforms support

That issue stems from it being a multi platform project and I do feel the same way about it. If we can make this an officially Mapbox supported product. This would no only provide the hand-on developers to help out but we would also be using code generation to make it more easy to scale the API. I would love to this but this is not for me to decide.

Pull requests take a long time to be approved as far as I can observe

That is me being a bottleneck and I tried to resolve this with assigning contributors. If you are interested in becoming one, please let me know and we can push this project forward together.

[aardrop]

@tobrun I know it's not perfect but my team and I love the work you've been doing on this so thank you!

If there is a potential for Mapbox to adopt this officially, I'm sure there are a lot of us that would love to try to move that along. Would it help if those of us trying to use this for commercial products contacted Mapbox? And if so is there a specific channel that would be more effective than the other?

[Shailevy]

@aaronsamkennedy, for now, lets adds some reactions and +1

[kpwebb]

@tobrun thanks for all your work on this and the thoughtful response. I'd love to sign up to help with maintaining this library. My organization using it extensively and are particularly interested in helping with components related to GeoJSON/Tileset implementation.

[stale]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions.