What is discussed about Flutter on Stack Overflow (SO) question-and-answer (Q&A) website: An empirical study

Abstract

Context:Mobile applications are growing in prevalence. Cross-platform application is one of the main challenges within mobile application development. Aiming to facilitate the process of mobile application development, the software engineering community developed multiple solutions to support cross-platform application development. Flutter is a recent cross-platform software development kit (SDK) that has been rising in popularity. Objective:This study aims to gain a better understanding of Flutter stance on Stack Overflow (SO). Method:The study identified and analyzed 176,876 Flutter-related questions to understand the interest towards Flutter. The study utilized Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) to identify Flutter-related topics discussed within the identified questions. Subsequently, a number of heuristics were utilized to gauge the popularity and difficulty of topics. Results:The study revealed that interest towards Flutter was steadily increasing on SO until it dropped in 2023 and SO users discuss 12 Flutter-related topics, with the topic of setup and build automation being the most popular and most difficult. Conclusion:This study highlights the interest towards Flutter on SO, identifies Flutter-related topics discussed on the website, and assess the topics popularity and difficulty. Software researchers, practitioners, educators, and Flutter contributors may utilize the results to steer their future Flutter-related efforts.