What's New In Flutter 2.2 Announced At Google I/O 2021?
Flutter is an open source toolkit for building beautiful, natively compiled apps for any device from a single codebase.
Customers around the world are using Flutter to make beautiful apps of all sizes in record time, to meet users wherever they may be.
Flutter 2.2 is so far the best version of Flutter, with updates that make it easier than ever for developers to monetize their apps through in-app purchases, payments and ads; to connect to cloud services and APIs that extend apps to support new capabilities; and with tooling and language features that allow developers to eliminate a whole class of errors, increase app performance and reduce package size.
The 2.2 release merges 2,456 PRs and closes 3,105 issues across the framework, engine, and plugins repositories.
With Flutter 2.2, enterprises, startups and entrepreneurs can build high-quality solutions that can reach their full potential with respect to their addressable market, allowing creative inspiration (rather than target platform) to be the only limiting factor. Hire Flutter developers from i-Verve Inc to build craft secure, cross-platform apps using a single codebase that runs smoothly on both iOS and Android platforms.
Analyst firm SlashData’s Mobile Developer Population Forecast 2021 shows that Flutter is now the most popular framework for cross-platform development, with 45% of the developers selecting it, representing 47% growth between Q1 2020 and Q1 2021. Google’s own data confirms this shift towards Flutter.
There are now over 200,000 apps in the Play Store alone built using Flutter.
Some of the most innovative Flutter apps are coming from names you might not have heard of, such as Wombo– the viral singing selfie app, Fastic– the intermittent fasting app, and Kite- a beautiful investment trading app.
Flutter is also used by large corporations including Tencent, whose WeChat messaging app is used by over 1.2 billion users; ByteDance, originators of TikTok, who have built 70 distinct apps using Flutter; and Capital One, BMW, eBay, Alibaba Group, Groupon, Square, Google and The New York Times.
Sound null safety is now the default for new projects. Null safety adds protection against null reference exceptions, giving developers the means to express non-nullable types in their code. And since Dart’s implementation is sound, the compiler can eliminate null checks at runtime, providing increased performance for your apps.
There are a lot of performance improvements in this release. For web apps, background caching using service workers has been offered. For Android apps, deferred components are supported. For iOS, Flutter has been working to eliminate or reduce first-run jank. Flutter has added a number of new features to the DevTools suite, as well as support for third-party tools extensions.
Flutter has been working on a few important areas of polish, such as improved accessibility for web targets.
Flutter continues to build trusted services that help developers responsibly monetize their apps. Flutter’s new ads SDK is updated in this release with null safety and support for adaptive banner formats. A new payment plugin is being introduced, built in partnership with the Google Pay team, that lets you take payment for physical goods on both iOS and Android. The in-app purchases plugin has been updated, along with a matching codelab.
More than a Google project
While Google continues to be the primary contributor to the Flutter project, there has been a broadening of Flutter to an ever growing number of platforms and operating systems.
Toyota is bringing Flutter to their next generation vehicle infotainment systems. In April, Canonical shipped their first release of Ubuntu with integrated support for Flutter, with Snap integration and support for Wayland.
Samsung is porting Flutter to Tizen, with an open source repository that others can also contribute to. Sony is leading the effort to deliver a solution for embedded Linux.
Designers benefit also from the open source nature of this project, with the announcement from Adobe of its updated XD to Flutter plugin. Adobe XD provides designers a great way to experiment and iterate. With enhanced Flutter support now, designers and developers can collaborate on the same assets, putting great ideas into production faster than ever.
Microsoft continues to collaborate with Flutter. Besides the work the Surface team has been doing to build foldable experiences with Flutter, work is being done on Flutter support for UWP apps built for Windows 10.
In addition to each new Flutter release, a release also includes a number of features which aren’t yet ready for production use but which Flutter wants you to be able to verify that they’re working the way you want them to. And finally, each new release comes with a set of associated tooling updates and updates from the larger Flutter community. There is too much going on with each new release of Flutter these days, so we’ll focus on the highlights.
1). Flutter 2.2 updates in stable
Flutter empowers you by removing traditional impediments to reaching your audience.
This release covers a wide range of improvements on top of Flutter 2, including updates across Android, iOS and web, new Material icons, updates to text handling, scrollbar behavior, and mouse cursor support for the TextSpan widget and new guidance on how to best support multiple kinds of platforms from a single source code base.
Dart 2.13:
The improvements are made through a new release of Dart- Dart 2.13. Dart is a modern, client-optimized programming language and is the “secret sauce” that powers Flutter.
Dart 2.13 expands support for native interoperability, with support for arrays and packed structs in FFI. It also includes support for type aliases, which increase readability and provide a gentle pathway for certain refactoring scenarios. Flutter continues to add integrations for the broader ecosystem, with a Dart GitHub Action and a curated Docker Official Image that is optimized for cloud-based deployment of business logic.
Flutter web updates:
Improvements have been made to both web renderers- HTML and CanvasKit. Semantic node position has been improved to close the gap between mobile and desktop web apps when using transforms. Flutter will continue to improve accessibility support. The latest version of Flutter DevTools now supports the layout explorer for your Flutter web apps.
iOS page transitions and incremental installs:
Incremental iOS installs have been implemented during the development process. There is a 40% decrease in the amount of time to install an updated version of your iOS app, which decreases your turn-around time when testing app changes. Hire iOS App Developers who can help accelerate your business growth with custom app development services.
Use Flutter to build platform adaptive apps:
Flutter has the support you need to not only target your app at multiple platforms but also intends to tailor your apps for screen size, input modes, and idioms of each of these platforms.
More Material icons:
Flutter has landed 2 separate PRs adding new Material icons to Flutter.
Improved text handling:
This gives your end users a more intuitive experience. Flutter continues to work to give you complete text editing actions. Flutter’s goal is that, by the time Flutter desktop gets to stable, your users won’t be able to tell the difference between editing text in their Flutter apps vs any other app on the host OS.
Automatic scrolling behavior:
As a part of the continuing quest to make Flutter apps behave like the best apps on each platform, Flutter took another look at scrollbars in this release.
Mouse cursors over text spans:
Things like this may seem small but they go a long way towards making a Flutter app feel just like a user expects it to feel.
2). Flutter 2.2 updates in preview
In addition to the new features available for production use, the Flutter 2.2 version comes with a number of features in preview. Users can give these features a try, and give feedback if they have any issues.
Preview: iOS shader compilation improvements:
Until now, the only way to avoid jank on iOS was to simplify scenes and animations, which was not ideal. However, on the dev channel is a preview of the new support in Skia for shader warm-up for Metal. Through Skia, Flutter now compiles the bundled shaders before the first frame workload begins.
On both Android and iOS, this implementation has a few drawbacks. So Flutter continues to investigate approaches to eliminate shader compilation jank, and all jank in general, that do not rely on this implementation. Flutter is working with the Skia team to reduce the number of shaders it generates in response to Flutter’s requests, as well as investigating how much Flutter might be implemented with a small set of statically defined shaders bundled with the Flutter Engine.
You can follow this project in the Flutter repo at https://github.com/flutter/flutter/projects/188 to see the progress.
Android deferred components:
For Android, this release uses Dart’s split AOT compilation feature to allow Flutter apps to download modules containing ahead-of-time compiled code and assets at runtime. Each of these installable splits is called a deferred component. By deferring the download of code and assets to only when needed, initial install size can be significantly reduced. Hire android app developers to build secure, feature-rich, high-performance, and robust android apps.
Flutter Windows UWP alpha:
This update is for desktop lovers. Support for Windows UWP has moved to alpha in the dev channel (beyond the stable 2.2 version). UWP allows you to take your Flutter apps to devices where standard Windows apps don’t run, including Xbox.
ARM64 Linux host support from Sony:
This PR enables you to build and run Flutter apps on ARM64 Linux machines.
It’s exciting to see the Flutter community bringing Flutter to places that the team at Google could never have imagined.
For more details read the blog continue - Google Announced Flutter 2.2 at Google I/O 2021, With New Features
