Fleet was a strategy to counter vs code. As such it did not work that well. It's not feature complete enough to consider as an intellij alternative and a bit too different for vs code users to take serious. So, easy to see why they are pulling the plug on that.
Vs Code of course is the wider ecosystem of plugin compatible editors based on the vs codium platform. This includes a lot of the recent AI editors, and several non vs codium based editors that can integrate the plugins (e.g. vi).
The core issue is that Fleet is outside of that ecosystem and doesn't have the community or user adoption to get that fixed. It's a chicken egg problem that's hard to fix. It's being pulled two directions. On one hand you have existing intellij users who use that to do most of their development. And on the other hand you have people that are using vs code and depend on a lot of its plugins. Fleet is a bit of an empty room for both groups of users. None of my more serious projects load correctly in fleet. I've tried it a few times and it's just missing too much stuff for me to take it seriously. And I bet VS Code users would be equally unhappy.
Fixing that would involve bringing over the majority of features from intellij and vs code, and recreating those in fleet. Which of course wasn't really happening given that it's being positioned as a closed source platform.
IMHO keeping Fleet closed source was the mistake that doomed the whole effort from day 1. In short, they were on their own and not really able to pull that off. Google is understandably focusing on supporting intellij, which at least has an open source core. Providing an open source core for intellij in 2009 was the key enabler that allowed them to move from eclipse to intellij. Google embraded it in 2013. Some of the older people here might remember that Android Studio started out on the Eclipse platform. Eclipse support ended in 2015. Open source is what made that transition possible.
Which of course raises the question what the whole point of a closed source Fleet was given that users, plugin developers, and major partners like Google are all focus on the open source ecosystem around intellij. And the rest of the ecosystem is vs code based.
Answer: there is none. Hence this foregone conclusion.
Vs Code of course is the wider ecosystem of plugin compatible editors based on the vs codium platform. This includes a lot of the recent AI editors, and several non vs codium based editors that can integrate the plugins (e.g. vi).
The core issue is that Fleet is outside of that ecosystem and doesn't have the community or user adoption to get that fixed. It's a chicken egg problem that's hard to fix. It's being pulled two directions. On one hand you have existing intellij users who use that to do most of their development. And on the other hand you have people that are using vs code and depend on a lot of its plugins. Fleet is a bit of an empty room for both groups of users. None of my more serious projects load correctly in fleet. I've tried it a few times and it's just missing too much stuff for me to take it seriously. And I bet VS Code users would be equally unhappy.
Fixing that would involve bringing over the majority of features from intellij and vs code, and recreating those in fleet. Which of course wasn't really happening given that it's being positioned as a closed source platform.
IMHO keeping Fleet closed source was the mistake that doomed the whole effort from day 1. In short, they were on their own and not really able to pull that off. Google is understandably focusing on supporting intellij, which at least has an open source core. Providing an open source core for intellij in 2009 was the key enabler that allowed them to move from eclipse to intellij. Google embraded it in 2013. Some of the older people here might remember that Android Studio started out on the Eclipse platform. Eclipse support ended in 2015. Open source is what made that transition possible.
Which of course raises the question what the whole point of a closed source Fleet was given that users, plugin developers, and major partners like Google are all focus on the open source ecosystem around intellij. And the rest of the ecosystem is vs code based.
Answer: there is none. Hence this foregone conclusion.