Why are there so few Flutter jobs? Should I switch to React?

It's because Google let go the Flutter team and now everyone's afraid to touch it because of long term maintenance. I personally strongly prefer Flutter over React Native. And with Cursor being fully compatible with Flutter, I'd expect it to be a secret weapon where you can just build web + mobile prototypes of anything within days.

But the teams that hire either Flutter or RN tend to not appreciate front end as much. I've been pressured to pick up RN for a while but it turns up negative.

React is a safe framework to pick up. If you're worried about employment, go for it.

Native Android has very similar functionality to Flutter and I think the Flutter devs are moving to Android. If you know Flutter, you already know Jetpack Compose. Android tends to pay very well because it's more of a niche but it's also rare. Since the Crowdstrike incident, Android has become the default operating system for hardware like car radios, those credit card machines, point of sales.

iOS is also interesting because it's half the market share, pays a little more, and AI just sucks at it. There's a bunch of things in Swift that you can't do with Kotlin. Swift is also something the standard LLMs can't do today so there's some job security. And by the time LLMs catch up to the average iOS dev, you could have the kind of mastery level to keep the job.

don't be a "flutter" developer or "react" developer - for a long and prosperous career do not pidgenhole yourself to framework-du-jour. godspeed!

Modern React (with functional components and hooks) is actually pretty easy to learn. I picked it up in my mid-30s with minimal JS experience (coming from the PHP world) and became a full-time frontend dev after that. Vite makes the tooling a breeze, but eventually you'll probably want to learn Next.js too (which adds various routing, rendering, and caching layers on top of React).

It never hurts to have one more tool in your toolbelt. Even if you end up hating React, knowing it will allow you to get jobs that currently use it and then you'll have the vocabulary and insider understanding that will allow you to advocate for a different framework or language if you strongly prefer it.

For what it's worth, I see more and more people tiring of Next.js and considering much simpler solutions like Astro, with or without React.

picking up another framework can be painful, but react is very popular so it has many good resources. Also make sure you learn the underlying language first, you may think you understand it enough but you probably don't and it will slow you down.

React is pretty universal at this point. Seems like Vue is a second followed by a smattering of other libs.

You should learn React. Everyone (including non-web devs) should probably have a basic understanding of React state management. Back in the day when JQuery was the top library, everyone was free to use whatever lib they wanted (and things besides jQuery were better for certain things), but it was also somewhat expected that everyone would have some experience, even in passing, of jQuery.

Flutter could be pretty productive?

I do feel flutter delivers more on the one codebase and relative simplicity technology than most things I've tried.

It would remain my first choice if I was starting, and I'd hire non Flutter devs for it.