Since its announcement, Flutter had already managed to capture everyone’s attention. Announcing Flutter 1.5 at Google I/O 2019 just marked an important milestone for the flutter framework. The first technical preview of flutter for the web is released. It means that the flutter latest version is powering Google’s smart display platform including the Google Home Hub.
With 336 patrons all over the world and more than 1,700 commits, this release is expected to be the biggest release of Flutter to date. With this release, Flutter will continue to serve quality and durability.
Here are the release notes Flutter 1.5 listed down for you!
A Summary of Everything that Changed with the Release of Flutter 1.5
The flutter latest version has come with a number of updates for the iOS and material widgets, increased support for trying out new things in web and desktop, number of important updates to flutter development plugins and tools as well as fixes to two regressions from Flutter 1.2. But, the most sought after new feature in Flutter 1.5 is the in-app purchase plugin, that is now available in beta for Android and iOS.
Journey from Mobile to Multi-Platform
The flutter team mission, since a long time, has been to build the best framework for developing iOS and Android mobile apps. With the developers currently being forced to choose between building the same app twice for two platforms or making a compromise using cross platform framework, flutter is a refreshing change with a single codebase to deliver beautiful, fast and tailored experiences with high developers’ productivity.
After the release of 1.0 version, the flutter team started experimenting with broadening the scope of flutter apps to other platforms. It was triggered by internal teams of Google increasingly relying on Flutter as well as the potential of dart platform to deliver portable experiences.
Within a few months of beginning the “Hummingbird” project, the team had the core flutter framework primitives working and soon after demos on mobile and desktop browsers were carried out.
Portable UI Framework for All Screens
A high performing, portable UI framework that can deliver beautiful and tailored experiences for multiple devices from a single codebase definitely has a high business potential.
For startups, the ability to reach users on mobile, web or desktop through the same app helps them reach a larger audience from the very first day rather than facing hurdles due to technical considerations. In the case of larger organizations, ability to deliver the same experience to all users with a single codebase reduces complexity and development cost.
Flutter Framework for Web
The first technical preview of flutter for the web is out. Although the technology is still in development, it is ready for early adopters to try and give feedback. The initial version of flutter for the web is not a general replacement for document experiences that HTML is optimized for, instead the intention is to make flutter a great way to develop highly interactive, graphicall rich content, where the benefits of sophisticated UI framework can be clearly seen.
The code is expected to evolve rapidly with a focus on performance and harmonizing the codebase with rest of the flutter project.
Flutter for Mobile
The core flutter framework has also received an upgrade this week, with the availability of Flutter 1.5 in our stable channel. It includes hundreds of changes as per developers’ feedback, including updates for new App Store iOS SDK requirements, updates to iOS and material widgets, engine support for new types of devices and Dart 2.3 that features new UI-as-code language features.
While the framework itself matures, the team at Google is building the supporting ecosystem. Architectural model of Flutter has always given priority to a small core framework, supplemented by a rich package community.
In the last few months, the team at Google has contributed production-quality packages for web views, Google maps and Firebase ML vision and the latest addition being initial support for in-app payments. With over 2000 open source packages available for Flutter, there are options for most cases.
Flutter for Desktop
For a few months, the flutter team has been working on the desktop as an experimental project. The targets are not production ready yet, but the team has published early instructions for developing flutter apps to run on Mac, Windows and Linux.
Another rapidly growing flutter platform is Chrome OS, with millions of them being sold every year. It is a perfect environment for flutter, for running the apps as well as a developer platform because it supports execution of both Android and Linux apps.
Flutter for Embedded Devices
As a final example of flutter’s portability, flutter is embedded on other devices. The team recently published samples that demonstrated flutter running on small scale devices such as Raspberry Pi. There is also an embedding API for flutter which allows it to be used in scenarios including home, automotive and beyond.
Within Google too some Google-built features for smart display platform are powered by Flutter currently. The Google Assistant team is enthusiastic to continue to expand the portfolio of features for the smart display in coming months. The ultimate goal is to use Flutter to drive the complete system UI.
Let’s Wrap Up Here!
Flutter app development has continued to grow in terms of popularity and adoption. It is no longer a mobile framework, but a multi platform framework that can help you reach your users anywhere.
LinkedIn conducted a study which showed that Flutter is the only fastest growing skill among the software engineers, based on the site members claiming it on their profile in the last 12 months. Also, in the recent StackOverflow developers survey, Flutter was listed as one of the most loved developer frameworks.
Sagar Bagsariya
Principal Mobile App Developer
by Manav Patel
