Filip Hráček / text /

Are we there yet?

This one’s for the Flutter developers among my readers. Back in 2018, I made a little bash script for myself called are_we_there_yet.sh. At the time, I was a DevRel guy at Flutter, and we always had a bunch of features and small fixes that have already been made but only to the bleeding edge of flutter/flutter. Most Flutter developers don’t build against the main of the Flutter SDK, for good reasons.

Aside: At the local Flutter Meetup last year, I had a good discussion with Matej Knopp who’s of the conviction that this avoidance of main is silly. According to him — and I hope I’m not misrepresenting his opinion here — we should all just be pinning Flutter SDK to whatever version works for us. So, don’t depend on the moving target of main, obviously, but pick a good ref and depend on that, and if you want to upgrade, upgrade. I realize this is a radical opinion, even to me, but Matej is obviously a smart guy so I thought I’d mention it here. I, for one, am mostly on stable these days.

So, imagine that someone (or maybe you, personally!) landed an important change to Flutter. The earliest example which I can remember following through are_we_there_yet.sh is commit 76468dd. This was a roll of the Dart SDK, so the commit itself is kind of underwhelming:

--- bin/internal/engine.version
+++ bin/internal/engine.version
-15013592916a6105ce3cc3957daaee63082ac770
+71457a67d0f9b10e8442d6db6d711bf00185ea66

But when it landed, it meant that Flutter developers gained access to some sweet new Dart SDK features of the time. (I think this was Dart 2.0, which was a huge step forward.)

Much more recently, I was following this bug which led to annoying (although debug-only) assertion crashes in my game when a Slider was inside a Table. This was fixed in late May:

But as I said, I’m mostly on stable nowadays, so that means I have to wait until the change gets promoted all the way there. So I made a note in my Flutter code:

// TODO: consider using a Table here
//       See: ~/dev/_util/are_we_there_yet.sh f9af233
return Column(
  ...
);

This works, of course, but there’s friction involved in running that tool. It only exists on my computer, so I can’t easily check when I’m on the go, and I can’t share the up-to-date status with other people.

What if I could just do this:

See: https://flutter.filiph.net/are/we/there/yet/f9af233

And get this:

So now I immediately see that, as of July 17, 2026, I could get the fix if I switched to beta, but I’ll need to wait until the next stable release.

Flutter stable is released four times a year (roughly February, May, August, November), so if I want to stay on stable, I’m not going to wait that long. The important thing is that now I know where I’m standing, it’s not a mystery anymore when this lands, I don’t need to bother the Flutter team with “are we there yet?” comments on github, and I can move around my own development accordingly (e.g., maybe wait with a major game UI code change until after August).

The tool is obviously provided as is. It should be able to handle some traffic but I give no guarantees. I’m also not open sourcing it because it’s an ugly package:shelf hack running on my VPS and I’m still figuring things out. If you want an open source alternative, just run the are_we_there_yet.sh script.

The web tool contains basic usage info and not much else. The canonical web address is: flutter.filiph.net/are/we/there/yet.

If you have ideas or comments, I’m all ears!

— Filip Hráček
July 2026