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2019 in review and beyond

Olivier Tassinari

@oliviertassinari
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2019 was a great year for Material UI. It puts us on an exciting path to solve even greater challenges in the coming years!

Growth

It's only with your trust that we could achieve the following outcomes in 2019. Thank you!

  • 📦 From 2.2M to 3.2M downloads per month (from 13% to 14% share of the React ecosystem).
  • 📈 From 1.6M to 3.1M unique visitors per year on the documentation.
  • ⭐️ From 43.1k to 53.3k stars, leave us yours 🌟.
  • 👨‍👩‍👧‍👦 From 1,064 to 1,581 contributors.
  • 💰 Grew financial support by 1.76X in 2019, compared to 2018.
  • 🏢 From 1.5 to 3 full-time equivalent developers, spread among multiple financially supported core team members.

The numbers speak for themselves. 2019 was super exciting and made Material UI one of the most advanced open-source, React-based, UI component libraries!

In review

When we started 2019, we were celebrating the launch of the first stable release of the framework and iterating to polish it (looking at the list of breaking changes, v3 is almost identical to v1). We thought we were almost done, and that we had done the hardest part with the release of the stable version. All we would need to do going forward was to keep up with the Material Design guidelines and fix a couple of bugs.

We soon realized that we could do way more. It was just the beginning :D. Some of the key factors:

  • The results of the 2019 Developer Survey have highlighted the immense potential for working on advanced components and features, especially for enterprise users. Developers are craving for a UI framework that they can learn once (for example few breaking changes, only one solution per problem) and use everywhere (for example comprehensive, customizable, high-quality).
  • Bootstrap had successfully released a theme store. Following this approach opened an opportunity to capture a fraction of the value Material UI creates for its users, and funnel it back into R&D on the framework.
  • The market for paid UI components is in the order of a couple of $100m/year, with dozens of companies positioned in this market. While React is only one technology among many (jQuery, Angular, ASP.NET, Blazor, Vue, WPF, UWP, etc) with which to build a UI, but we believe that Web and React will become the dominant technology in the next 5 years for enterprises. Material UI is uniquely positioned to address this market with non-MIT features.
  • Building UIs should be simpler, it still too slow and complex. Designers and developers should benefit from a more integrated experience.
  • Every now and then, we witness the appearance of a new React UI component library built from scratch (UXPin keeps track of some of them). And every time we asked ourselves, "what could have we done differently to empower this library"? We believe that starting from scratch, while maximizing freedom, is incredibly inefficient. Most UI libraries need the same features but are implemented with a wide spectrum of accessibility, developer experience, and overall design quality. We won't rest until we successfully unify these efforts. It's a long-term mission and will probably take years. The foundation will be the release of an un-styled version of our components.

Achievements

Looking at 2020

2019 was great, 2020 is going to be even more exciting! We will continue in the same direction.

Survey

The Developer Survey we ran last year was so insightful that we plan to run it every year. It's a great opportunity for us to adjust the strategy and to pause to analyze the outcome of the actions we took in the previous year.

Open source roadmap

Most of the time we work in the open. Here's our public roadmap. We plan to release a new major around the end of the year (v5). We will promote components that are in the lab to the core, migrate to styled-components, and more.

Store

We will increase the depth of content available with more themes and templates. We have recently released a Sketch design library, and are planning to support Figma, and Adobe XD too. For Framer, we have made the key components available as a Framer package.

Enterprise

We plan to release an enterprise-class offering, starting with the data grid. Enterprise features will build on the open-source version of the components.

Hiring

We are looking for a full-time Software Developer to join us!

If you want to help us onboard more full-time developers in the team, here are a couple of ways. Spreading the word to other developers who are looking for a great UI framework is also extremely helpful 🙌.