What's New in Flutter 3: Everything You Need to Know
Google developed Flutter many years ago, intending to build the best cross-platform software framework for mobile applications. One of the greatest advantages of using Flutter is that it can help build robust and scalable mobile applications for multiple platforms, such as Android, iOS, Windows, macOS, Linux, and even the web, using the same codebase.
Although both Windows and Linux were in beta when building apps for Windows back in February, those platforms were still in stable support. But that has changed thanks to Flutter 3, which stably supports macOS and Linux during this year's Google I/O. In its announcement, Google highlights two points: The first is the low-cost Linux support provided by Canonical (Ubuntu’s publisher) and Google's collaboration to "offer a highly-integrated, best-of-breed development environment for developers".
Thanks to the hard work of our Flutter contributors who made Flutter now stable for macOS and Linux, in addition to Windows. There are various exciting things to come with the release of the Flutter 3 version, including the update on Flutter’s support for macOS and Linux, huge performance enhancements, mobile & web updates, and many more.
Research shows that more than 91% of developers agreed that Flutter is a much smoother and seamless platform that doesn’t take much time to create and publish an application. On top of that, around 85% of developers mentioned that they could publish their app on multiple platforms than before.
This article will explore what’s new in Flutter 3, including new features, performance improvements, and recent updates one by one. Let us dive in!
What’s New in Flutter 3?
Let us get a close look to see what’s next in the new release of Flutter 3.
Firebase Support in Flutter
There are more tools and services needed by app publishers than just the UI framework to allow them to move forward in terms of developing, releasing, and operating the apps, including data authentication, device testing, cloud functionality, and storage. Various services like AppWrite, Sentry, and AWS Amplify have received Flutter’s back for enhanced functionality.
Research shows that over 63% of app developers make use of Firebase in their mobile applications. The suite of Firebase plugins for Flutter has now become a key part of Firebase's offering in response to the real-life reality and the growth of Flutter. That means plugins now come under the Firebase’s repo and website. In addition to this, Google focuses on building new Flutter widgets that make it easier to use Firebase in your application.
Additionally, you can now get an overview of your app's stability via the Firebase Crashlytics plugin, which will allow you to identify the bugs simply by tracking the errors. They are built around critical metrics such as "crash-free users", which make it easy for you to keep an eye on the stability of your app.
Linux and macOS Support
In the days when Flutter was released, the developers' community was highly appreciative of it - Flutter is, to this day, considered to be the most powerful cross-platform development framework on the market. It is now also possible to build apps for Windows, Web, and embedded devices directly from the framework, in addition to Android and iOS apps.
Flutter developers no longer face any challenges in creating applications for macOS and Linux devices since Flutter 3 is now available. Developers no longer have to do the tedious work of adding platforms to their products.
Gradle version update
You might have noticed that the generated files in Flutter 3 use the latest versions of the Gradle and Android Gradle plugins while creating a new project using the Flutter tool. While in an older version of Flutter, you used to crash the versions to 7.4 for Gradle, and 7.1.2 for the Android Gradle plugin manually.
Dart 2.17
The latest version of Flutter 2.17 features a new Dart SDK, a version with a new language - regardless of whether you use Flutter, these new features are accessible to all developers.
The hallmark feature of Dart 2.17 offers app developers the ability to extend enums and override its default functions quickly and more efficiently. It allows enums to work very similarly to custom-written classes.
Flutter’s Games Toolkit
The Flutter 3 is way more focused on casual gamers and has released an easy-to-use casual games tool kit for game developers. It comes as a starter kit of templates and credits for Ads, and cloud services.
The most interesting fact about Flutter 3 is that its engineers have created a fun pinball game powered by Firebase and Flutter’s web support, showing the versatility of the latest Flutter 3 update.
Theme Extensions
Theme Extensions allow app developers to add anything to the ThemeData of the material library. Developers no longer need to extend ThemeData and implement copyWith, lerp, and other methods, and they can now mention ThemeData.extensions to get their job done in no time. In addition, they can offer ThemeExtensions as a package developer.
Menu Cascading and Support for the MacOS System
The latest version of Flutter offers a wide range of features, including interactive models for compilation to build support, internationalization, and fresh inputs for platform-specific integration, and offers the best accessibility.
The main objective for all these updates is to offer complete flexibility in using the operating system and share optimal UI and logic based on requirements more effectively. The new features of Flutter offer great support to the platform beyond rendering pixels.
Ads
With the new release of Flutter 3, it is now possible to create personalized ads based on the unique needs of publishers and manage Apple's App Tracking Transparency (ATTT) requirements. Google provides a User Messaging Platform (UMP) SDK that substitutes the previous open-source Consent SDK.
Web and Mobile Updates in Flutter 3
Let us take a look at the following features of Flutter 3 in terms of web and mobile
For Mobile Updates
iOS Variable Refresh Rate Support
Flutter 3 will now support variable refresh rates on iOS devices that have ProMotion displays, along with iPhone 13 Pro and iPad Pro. The increase in refresh rates for Flutter apps from 60 Hz to 120 Hz can provide smoother animations on these devices than they had earlier been able to.
Foldable Phone Support
Foldable mobile devices will be supported and will have a great collaboration with Microsoft. With these new features of Flutter 3, Flutter app developers can now create dynamic and productive experiences on foldable devices.
Streamlined iOS Releases
Flutter 3 offers a new option to create an ipa command that helps app developers to launch their iOS applications more efficiently than before.
For Web Updates
Web App lifecycle
Flutter 3 comes with its new lifecycle API for web applications that gives complete flexibility for developers with full control over the bootstrap process of their Flutter app from the hosting HTML page.
This helps Lighthouse to determine the speed of your app and can be applied to various use cases to streamline the development process.
Image Decoding
The image decoding feature in Flutter 3 made it possible for Flutter Web to perceive and use the imagecoder API in the browser automatically. Asynchronously, this API decodes images with the browser's codecs to ensure there is no interruption to the main thread.
Thus, images will run twice as fast without blocking the main thread, and it will remove all the junk caused by images previously.
Significant Improvements in Flutter 3
The development of Flutter isn't just about the extended platform support of the framework. In addition to the new support for Material Design 3, the framework has added a host of other features and functionalities to make it easy to use.
Furthermore, Flutter is now fully native to Apple silicon for development. When Flutter was released, it was compatible with Apple M1-powered devices. Now, Flutter takes full advantage of Dart's support for Apple silicon, enabling much faster compilation on M1 devices and universal binaries for macOS application development.
What to Expect Next in Flutter?
The major highlight of Flutter 3 is that it is now available on 6 different platforms: Android, iOS, Web, Windows, Mac, and Linux. Now the next and most important question that people may have is ‘what to expect next in Flutter?’
According to Google's product manager for Flutter, Tim Sneath, the project will support both Chrome and Firefox. The goal of building support for those platforms has been to provide Flutter with a robust platform to develop.
Moreover, Google will continue to enhance Flutter in two significant areas: improving developer productivity and expanding its capabilities in the upcoming years.
Closing Line
Therefore, it can be said that the latest release of Flutter 3.0 shows the massive success of Google, which will attract many more businesses to join its community. As a result, the Flutter community is expected to grow continually much faster with the increasing number of Flutter applications. Finding technology better than Flutter is a question to think about when building applications for multiple platforms to cover a wide range of audiences and provide the best experiences.
If you are planning to build an application for multiple platforms and are not sure how to get started, I would recommend you hire an experienced Flutter developer from a leading Flutter app development company that can help build robust, scalable, and feature-rich applications at affordable prices.
