Flutter Updates

Flutter’s popularity has grown immensely over the last few years. The main reason is that they continue to provide evidence of growth with new updates. Flutter 3, announced almost 3 months ago, was a huge milestone that offered reliable support for application development for all six platforms. But they didn’t just stop there. On August 31, Flutter announced the launch of Flutter 3.3 at the Flutter Vikings conference. The version has merged around 5,687 pull requests.  The update has added some more refinements and improvements to Flutter 3 like Dart 2.18 support, new components of material 3, Scribble, some exciting extensions, and much more. Let’s have a look. Framework Features Introducing Global Selection Flutter didn’t really show good behavior when it came to text selection. You couldn’t select the widgets by default with a single swiping gesture. But no more of that fuss. Flutter 3.3 has introduced this new feature of the “SelectableArea” widget, allowing adaptive selection controls to web app developers. To get the feature just wrap your route body with the widget of “SelectableArea”. Flutter will do the rest for you. Rich Text Editing with Text Input Flutter 3.3 has now improved its rich text editing support. Now you can receive granular text updates from “TextInputPlugin”. In previous updates, the “TextInputPlugin” only provided the new states with no delta between the old and the new. But “TextEditingDeltas” and “DeltaTextInputClient” have replaced this informational gap. An Improved Touchpad (trackpad) Input Flutter 3.3 offers improved touchpad input support for its users. With this feature, you get a much smoother and richer control, further reducing any chances of misinterpretation. Say goodbye to clicking and dragging, simply manipulate content with the pointer on the touch screen. With a wide range of different touch gestures, there won’t be any awkward interactions. You can further read about the pan gesture, zoom gesture, rotate gesture, and other details here. A Jump to Dart 2.18 Like most of the past Flutter launches, Flutter 3.3 has also bumped up Dart language by introducing Dart 2.18. The 2.18 version has extended its support to Swift and Objective-C codes with “ffigen” – an API wrapper generation tool. The Flutter 3.3 update has streamlines the process of making API calls. This is surely pleasing news for iOS and Mac developers. The developers of Android and iOS are also allowed to use platform-specific code for the required HTTP requests. Scribble it! Flutter 3.3 now also supports Scribble – a free-hand drawing tool for iPad using the input of Apple Pencil. It has already been enabled by default on “TextField”, “Cupertino TextField” (ios-style textfield), and “EditableText”. Upgrade to Flutter 3.3 to get this feature.  Windows Desktop  In previous Flutter versions, you could only set your windows desktop application’s version by the file that’s specific to the window app itself. But now, you can set your app versions and build arguments from the project “pubspec yaml” file. Now it’s easy to enable auto-updating and get the recent version to your client. Material Design 3 is Here! Material design 3 new components have now been incorporated in the Flutter 3.3 version with updates on “Chips”, “IconButton” and medium and large variants of “AppBar”. The following images will help you get a better idea. Impeller – A new rendering Engine on its Way Flutter is also releasing a new replacement for Skia. Flutter developers can now test this new rendering layer – Impeller. The purpose of this improvement is to give a significant boost to the Android and iOS apps with its runtime taking complete advantage of hardware-accelerated APIs like Vulkan for Android and Metal for iOS. Check out Flutter 3.7 update that just rolled out with amazing features and improvements. You can surely expect an almost silkier animation on your Flutter applications. Impeller has also removed the need for runtime shader compilation which has been a major source of frame time janks in the applications. It is being tested actively and iOS developers have been asked to submit their reviews on it too. Impeller for Android is still under process. New Packages in Flutter 3.3 go_router  Things can get complex while developing an app with complicated navigation needs. But now it’s easy to design a routing logic that will work fine across the web, desktop, and mobile through go_router. It is a Declarative Routing Package designed by the Flutter team. By providing a declarative, URL-based API, this flutter package gives you an easy way to handle deep links and navigation across different screens. VS Code Extension Enhancement  tools to your installation that will later help your development workflow. Almost every version of Flutter has released some enhancements of Visual Code Extension and Flutter 3.3 has done it too. By using Dart: Add Dependency, you can now add multiple, comma-separated dependencies in a single step. An Update on DevTools The new update comes with UX and some performance improvements to data display tables. There will be a less jittery and much faster scrolling experience of large lists of events.  How has the performance improved? Raster Cache Improvements The improvement resulted in faster image loading capability by reducing Dart GC (Garbage Collection) pressure and the need for multiple copies. Before this, for the loading of asset images, the “ImageProvider” needed the compressed data to be copied many times. By the addition of “ui.ImmutableBuffer.fromAsset”, you can load the compressed image directly into the structure utilized for decoding. The improvement has reduced the loading time to almost half of what it was before. Deprecation of 32-bit iOS The new version no longer supports iOS versions 9, 10, and 32bit iOS devices. Deprecation of Bitcode Bitcode helps you in reducing an app’s size through recompilation. In the upcoming Xcode 14 release, bitcode most probably will not be allowed for iOS app submission. Although it is disabled by default, for the projects that have it enabled, it will emit a built warning. No iOS Pointer Compression – A Step towards Stability Pointer compression reserves a huge virtual memory region for

Flutter continues to bring amazing updates with exciting features that help developers build apps more productively. Over the past couple of years, Flutter has gained much popularity in the mobile app development realm. Businesses are opting for newer and more advanced technologies to build apps to mark their presence in the online marketplace. Flutter just released its stable release Flutter 3.0, with app support for macOS and Linux desktops as well. Recently, about 3 months ago, Flutter announced support for Windows. Now, here is the latest and much-improved Flutter release with improvements to firebase integration, and new productivity and performance features. Moreover, this release has support for Apple silicon as well. In this article, we are going to cover all the new features and improvements Flutter has incorporated into Flutter 3.0. Introducing Flutter 3.0 Flutter started as an attempt to revolutionize app development. This was only possible by combining the iterative development model of the web with hardware-accelerated graphics rendering. And also the pixel-level control that was previously the preserve of games. Over the last four years since Flutter came into existence, Flutter has gradually built on these foundations by adding new framework capabilities and new widgets, deeper integration with the underlying platforms, a rich library of packages, and many performances and tooling improvements. Flutter expanded iOS and Android with web and Windows support in previous releases. And now, Flutter 3.0 brings stable support for macOS and Linux apps as well. It requires more than rendering pixels to add platform support. It includes new input and interaction models, compilation and build support, accessibility, internationalization, as well as platform-specific integration. Flutter’s goal is to give you the flexibility to take full advantage of the fundamental operating system while sharing as much UI and logic as you choose. Flutter 3 Release Date Flutter 3.0 was released on May 11, 2022. It came up with a stable version for macOS and Linux stable support and performance improvements as well. What’s New in Flutter 3.0? As flutter aims to deliver an immersive development experience to its users, Flutter 3.0 came with the most beneficial features. Firebase Integration Improvements While building an app, there is a lot more involved than a UI framework. To build an app, developers need a comprehensive approach that helps build, release, and operate the app. This includes services like authentication, data storage, cloud functions, and device testing. Different services like Sentry, AppWrite, and AWS Amplify. Firebase provides app services to Google. Moreover, developer benchmarking studies by SlashData show that 62% of Flutter developers choose Firebase for their apps. So, Flutter has been working with Firebase to expand and better integrate Flutter as a first-class integration, lately. This includes bringing the Firebase plugins for Flutter to 1.0 and adding better documentation and tooling. And also new widgets like FlutterFire UI provide developers with a reusable UI for auth and profile screens. Foldable Phone Support Interestingly, Flutter 3.0 release now also supports foldable mobile devices. New features and widgets in Flutter 3.0 allow you to create dynamic and delightful experiences on foldable devices. This only was made after a collaboration spearheaded by Microsoft. As part of this work, MediaQuery now contains a list of DisplayFeatures that describes the bounds and states of device elements. For example hinges, folds, and cutouts. In addition, the DisplayFeatureSubScreen widget now positions its child widget without overlapping the bounds of DisplayFeatures. Also, it has already been integrated with the framework’s default dialogs and pop-ups, making Flutter aware and responsive to these elements. Updated Gradle Version The generated files with Flutter tools now use the latest versions of the Gradle and Android Gradle plugins. You will need to manually bump the versions to 7.4 for Gradle, and 7.1.2 for the Android Gradle plugin for existing projects. Flutter Casual Games Toolkit Flutter is an app framework for most developers. Unfortunately, they lack knowledge about a growing community around casual game development, taking advantage of hardware-accelerated graphics support. Interestingly, Flutter supports them with open-source game engines like Flame. Flutter also aims to make it easier for casual game developers to get started. So, at I/O they announced the Casual Games Toolkit. It provides a starter kit of templates and best practices for developers along with credits for ads and cloud services. You can easily integrate Game Center on iOS and Google Play on Android devices. Dart 2.17 Flutter has announced a new Dart SDK, version 2.17 with newer upgrades and additions. This release brings Flutter’s core themes of leading productivity and platform portability. It offers new language features that include enums with member support, improved parameter forwarding to superclasses, and more flexibility for named parameters. Flutter also improved tools with a new major version of package:lints. It is a tool to support checking Dart code against Flutter’s best practices. Also a broad update of core library API documentation with rich code samples. For improved platform integration. Flutter has new templates for using dart:ffi (native C interop) in Flutter plugins, experimental support for RISC-V processors, and support for signing macOS and Windows executables. Material 3 Support in Flutter 3.0 Flutter 3.0 now supports Material Design 3, the latest design system from Material Design. Flutter 3 provides support for Material 3.0. This includes ‘Material You’ having features like dynamic color, an updated color system, typography, and many updated components. Additionally, new visual effects are introduced in Android 12 like a new touch ripple design and a stretch overscroll effect. In flutter 3.0, developers can adopt an adaptable, cross-platform design system that offers dynamic color schemes and updated visual components. Lint Package Updates Apps built with Flutter 3.0 with flutter create automatically enable the v2.0 sets of lints. Current apps, packages, and plugins are encouraged to migrate to v2.0. This tends to follow the latest and greatest best practices in the Flutter world, by running flutter pub upgrade –major-versions flutter_lints. Most of the latest lint warnings in v2 come with automated fixes. After you’ve upgraded to the latest package version in pubspec.yaml