Thoughts on adding more maintainers?

[tomquas]

@demochenkoalex — First off, a huge thank you for this package. Seriously, it gave us such a great head start on our chat module, and we're really grateful for that.

That said, I won't lie — it makes me a bit sad to see things have slowed down here. The last real feature work was back in mid-2023, and there are some genuinely useful PRs from @nicosbraun that have been sitting there for over six months now.

I know we can't see what's going on behind someone's GitHub avatar — life happens, and open source is a labor of love. But I wanted to ask: would you be open to adding a few more maintainers to help carry the load?
Honestly, I really don't want to fork this project. It feels wrong — like it would brush aside all the work you've put in. But we're getting to a point where we need to figure out what's next for us. We'd much rather see this package keep going with you at the helm, maybe with some extra hands to help out.

What do you think?

[demchenkoalex]

Hey! Thanks for the kind words.

I started this project back in 2019 and have poured countless hours into it ever since. At the time I had plenty of free time (and less experience), so I could keep pushing it forward. Now I hold a fairly senior role at a large company and simply don't have the time - most days I work well beyond the standard 8 hours.

A few times I seriously considered shutting the project down, but so many people rely on it that I couldn't bring myself to do it. Last year I made one final big push: I reached out to companies that make chat SDKs to explore partnership deals (the package has decent traffic, and having their logos/docs would help users get not just a UI but a complete production-ready chat solution). Every company showed interest, but in the end no deals materialised - I guess that's the common fate of many open-source maintainers.

So I have no way to monetise it enough to hire help, and right now I can't invest more personal time either. I love the idea of community contributions, but the whole point of this package was to deliver a truly high-quality, performant, animated chat UI that feels on par with native apps like WhatsApp or Telegram - and that turns out to be far harder than it sounds. Anyone can generate a basic chat UI with AI in seconds, but it'll be mediocre. To make something genuinely beautiful and polished takes an enormous amount of careful work.

I've never merged a PR that didn't meet my high standards. I feel bad asking contributors - who often add big features - to keep fixing more and more small things. In the past I'd sometimes merge something I was mostly happy with and then tweak it myself afterward, but with Nicholas's merge requests, for example, while the code works, there are small issues, like bad offsets here and there, edge cases not covered (and there are a lot of edge cases in such a highly customisable library), and some details that just don't look right to me. Six months ago I tried to polish those myself, but it was either difficult with Flutter or the result still didn't feel up to the level I want.

That's why I haven't merged them yet, and why it's hard for me to bring on regular contributors: I know no one would be willing to spend countless unpaid hours chasing every tiny detail. I'm sorry, but I also can't lower the quality bar - if I did, the package wouldn't be any different from something quickly generated by AI from scratch.

If you (or your team) have a business that values those small details and great UX, and your company would allow you to dedicate time to this package, I'd be happy to add you as a maintainer. Otherwise, I'd feel bad asking volunteers to perfect every little thing for free, and I'll just have to keep working on it myself at my own pace.

[tomquas]

Thank you for sharing your personal story with us, it provides a lot of helpful context for your vision.

While I'd say it is not impossible to make money with flutter_chat_ui, you'll be competing with getstream.io and so many others who a) have the complete user experience already, and b) provide the chat infrastructure behind the widgets. My team and I are using flutter_chat_ui as a frontend for Simplex Chat, and from personal experience I can say that building and operating such a platform is massive effort.

The high standards are curse and blessing. YMMV, but I had to lower my own standards in order to get things rolled out. As a founder of three companies owning both organizational and technical roles, and the story kept repeating itself: I could not live up to my own standards while the market and my co-workers expected me to deliver. I needed to settle in between japanese-craftsmanship perfection and good-enough ;)

In this repo, even 'imperfect' contributions add value by making a feature visible so a designer can later refine it – I’ve found Claude Code is actually excellent at cleanup and styling once the logic is there.

I need to be realistic about my own bandwidth. However, I hope that by sharing your motivation here, you’ll attract the right people who resonate with your goals.