Flutter 3

At its Google I/O conference today, Google announced the availability of Flutter 3.0, the latest version of its cross-platform UI framework. This is the big one, in that Flutter can now be used to build production-quality apps across Android, iOS, Web (desktop), Linux, Windows desktop, and macOS.

“We’re delighted to announce the launch of Flutter 3 as part of the Google I/O keynote,” Google’s Tim Sneath announced. “Flutter 3 completes our roadmap from a mobile-centric to a multiplatform framework, with the availability of macOS and Linux desktop app support, along with improvements to Firebase integration, new productivity and performance features, and support for Apple Silicon.”

As the product has matured, more of you have started to build apps with it. Today there are over 500,000 apps built with Flutter. Analytics from research firms like data.ai, along with public testimonials, show Flutter is used by a broad list of customers in many segments: from social apps like WeChat to finance and banking apps like Betterment and Nubank; from commerce apps like SHEIN and trip.com to lifestyle apps like Fastic and Tabcorp; from companion apps like My BMW to public institutions such as the Brazil government.

 

Updates:

1. Material You & dynamic themes

At last year’s Google I/O, shortly after the company announced its then-upcoming Material You design language, the Flutter team confirmed that developers would be able to bring this third generation of Material Design to their own apps. Less than a year later, we now see the fruits of that effort, with Flutter 3 bringing a variety of new Material You widgets.

Beyond that, significant effort has gone into custom theme generation within Flutter 3. Similar to Android 12, it’s possible to automatically craft an app’s entire color scheme from a single starting color. Importantly, though, this capability is in no way limited to Android 12 and its wallpaper-based themes. Should you wish, your app can use just about any color as its baseline for a custom theme.

2. Dart 2.17

a. Enums

b. named_args

c. super_constructor

 3. Firebase support

Google’s offering for app services is Firebase, and developer benchmarking studies by SlashData show that 62% of Flutter developers use Firebase in their apps. So over the last few releases, we’ve been working with Firebase to expand and better integrate Flutter as a first-class integration. That has included bringing the Firebase plugins for Flutter to 1.0, adding better documentation and tooling, and new widgets like FlutterFire UI that provide developers with reusable UI for auth and profile screens.

Today we’re announcing the graduation of Flutter/Firebase integration to a fully-supported core part of the Firebase offering. We’re moving the source code and documentation into the main Firebase repo and site, and you can count on us evolving Firebase support for Flutter in lockstep with Android and iOS.

In addition, we’ve made major improvements to support Flutter apps using Crashlytics, Firebase’s popular real-time crash reporting service. With the updates to the Flutter Crashlytics plugin, you can track fatal errors in real-time, giving you the same set of features that are available to other iOS and Android developers. This includes important alerting and metrics like “crash-free users” that help you stay on top of your app’s stability. The Crashlytics analysis pipeline has been upgraded to improve the clustering of Flutter crashes, making it faster to triage, prioritize, and fix issues. And lastly, we streamlined the plugin setup process so that it only requires a couple of steps to get up and running with Crashlytics, right from your Dart code.

4. Casual Games Toolkit

Alongside the major changes in Flutter 3, Google is sharing the Casual Games Toolkit, a new suite of guidelines, templates, tutorials, and credits for game developers who want to use Flutter. Up until this point, the Flutter team’s focus had been on assisting the creation of apps, not games; so this is an exciting bit of growth for the framework.

To showcase Flutter’s potential for small, casual games, the delightful I/O Pinball game released earlier this week was created with Flutter and Firebase. For those wanting to dive a bit deeper into using Flutter for game development, you may also want to look into the third-party Flame game engine.