Get to know Flutter 3.0
Google I/O brought us exciting news in 2022 - a new version of Flutter, the most popular cross-platform mobile framework, was available to the developer world!
This article will explore Flutter 3.0 features and how it benefits and impacts developers and users.
Introduction
If you don’t know Flutter yet, it is an open-source framework by Google for building multi-platform applications. The list of supported platforms is long - Flutter started as a mobile applications framework to build Android and iOS apps. Today, with Flutter, you can also create applications for the web and desktop (Windows, Linux and macOS).
A single codebase means that one development team can produce apps publishing to six different platforms.
According to the sources, there are over 500,000 apps built with Flutter across a wide range of different companies - from small start-ups to technology giants like WeChat or BMW.
Flutter 3.0 Highlights
Flutter 3.0 has a lot of features and improvements to Flutter 2.0. It is hard to mention all of them, so here’s a highlight of the most important ones:
Stable support for macOS and Linux apps
Previous Flutter releases added support for building desktop apps. In Flutter 3.0, macOS and Linux apps have finally hit stable.
Stable support means that the platform is fully prepared and apps are ready for production. That includes:
desktop-specific integrations (e.g. mouse gestures)
full support for all languages in text inputs (internationalisation)
full accessibility support (screen readers, navigation)
Apple Silicon support (for macOS desktop apps)
With this update, desktop applications built with Flutter are high-quality and indistinguishable from the native desktop apps:
Flutter “MyArtist” App, based on the source code from https://github.com/flutter/codelabs/tree/master/boring_to_beautiful
Material Design 3
Material Design 3 is the latest version of Google’s design system, including personalisation and accessibility features. A massive change in how the framework builds the UI allows the user to customise almost everything, including dynamic colours and typography.
For example, when a user changes the wallpaper on their device, the whole palette of colours used in the system is automatically generated and applied based on that image. Moreover, the colour palette is in line with colour theory and accessibility is catered for the best user experience.
For developers, it means they can immediately take advantage of the new design system to build a better user experience for their clients.
For users, applications can now be more consistent with their colour and style preferences. And visually impaired people can now have better access to essential features.
Flutter’s Games Toolkit
Another feature added to the Flutter 3.0 ecosystem is Flutter’s Casual Games Toolkit. It offers a starter pack to develop app-like games, such as board, card or strategy games.
As Flutter is a multi-platform, it is an excellent tool for developing games and publishing them to mobile devices, desktop systems and the web.
If you want to see a demo of the Flutter game, visit the Flutter Pinball website:
Example of the Fluttter game - Flutter Pinball
Support for foldable phones
With foldable phones becoming increasingly popular, the Google team collaborated with Microsoft to bring foldable phone support to the Flutter framework.
Thanks to that, Flutter apps can now leverage multi-screen devices and provide a better user experience to the foldable phone’s users.
Flutter Gallery Sample App. Source: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dual-screen/flutter/samples
Summary
There is a reason why Flutter is the most popular cross-platform UI toolkit. It not only helps to create a delightful experience for the developers but also for the users.
With Flutter 3.0, the Google team has brought more features and improvements into the Flutter ecosystem. It helps to build mature and production-ready apps in a very reasonable timeframe. With a focus on stability around the multi-platform features, Flutter is a great solution to develop Android, iOS, desktop and web apps from a single source code.
If you want to read more about Flutter 3.0, visit this blog post announcement from the Flutter team.
References
(1) According to the 2021 developer survey:
Statista - Cross-platform mobile frameworks used by software developers worldwide from 2019 to 2022
