Is this project abandoned?

First, I’d like to thank @hnvn for this plugin. I was really happy when I found it back in the summer of 2020. It looked like the simplest way to add downloading of files in the background to my app 😃 I’ve been using it in my app since then and I’m quite happy with it!

However, I’ve always had a feeling that this plugin could be much better. The API was clunky and could use some refactoring, some docs were missing, and the number of issues on GitHub was quite high even back then.

I turned a blind eye to these shortcomings. I was hoping that over time, it will surely “grow up” and get better. Unfortunately, after almost 2 years, I feel like it hasn’t improved at all. Still, it’s the first search result if you google “flutter download file”. Still, there are answers on StackOverflow recommending to use it.

IMHO, this project is facing a few problems:

1. There are almost 300 issues now. It’s a very large number, especially since only 1 person seems to be maintaining it (@hnvn, the author). I doubt it’s feasible to answer all of them in a reasonable time, even if the maintainer has lots of time and is very dedicated. Many of the issues read along the lines “plugin does not work, help” and there’s no solution. It can discourage future developers from depending on it.

2. There are 21 PRs. Tons of work has been put into them and it’s a great pity that no progress is being made to get them into master. One that especially breaks my 💙heart is #283 – merging it would be a big step ahead. Unfortunately, it looks like it’s been abandoned. Also, there are lots of good ideas mentioned in #550.

3. Points 1 and 2 lead me to 3 – low responsiveness from the maintainer(s). I’m sure there are people who’d like to help in the development of the plugin, but they see that issues are left unanswered for months, the same goes for PRs. IMHO, I think that if the maintainer(s) were more active, more people would contribute to the plugin, because it’d be clear that their fix has a chance of being merged into master. Currently, I feel that the general sentiment is that the project is abandoned (1 2)

4. Better API documentation. According to pub.dev, only 46% of public members have API docs. Samples could be improved as well.

5. Support for more platforms. As of v3, Flutter officially supports 6 platforms: iOS, Android, Web, macOS, Linux, and Windows. It’s kinda sad that this plugin only supports iOS and Android.

6. Clunky API. This is somewhat subjective and would require further discussion. For now, I’ll give a few specific examples:

   • having to manually handle isolate communication #252
   • plugin using print internally. We can’t disable it.
   • plugin is not federated.
   • Android implementation is constructing SQL queries manually. It’s very easy to get them wrong and I sometimes feel that my app will explode in a second because some weird SQL bug is gonna appear. It’s been a long time since I’ve done native Android development, but maybe Room could be used for this?
   • there are no tests for neither Flutter nor the native side. This also kind of leads to the lack of CI.

If you feel similar to me, please react with a “👍” and/or share your own opinion. This way, the issue will gain more visibility.

It’s great that the project is hosted by fluttercommunity. Hopefully, we, the Flutter Community, will together help improve this project for the benefit of all of us 😃

[bartekpacia]

@sudhanshugairola The problem is that @hnvn can’t just “take some time out to fix the bugs”. We’ve gotta respect that.

[hnvn]

Sorry guys, I am moving to other tech domain (Web3, Blockchain). I am not sure that I can have enough time to continue maintaining this project. I understand that the project should re-write to clean up API and be able to support multiple platform, that’s why I open a PR for v2.0 but it would require a lot of time on researching, working on POC,… I am afraid that I cannot have time to do it. So I hope that I can handover the project to a new maintainer. So if anyone who have good experiences on both of Flutter and mobile native framework and wish to contribute to the project, please don’t hesitate to contact me at [e-mail] to discuss about the handover process. In the mean time, I will do my best to look at PRs. Thanks you.