It's here! Flutter3.0 release full analysis

This article is reproduced from the public account: Qunying Biography Author: Xu Yisheng

The culmination of our journey of multi-platform UI development on mobile, desktop, and the web.

We're excited to announce that we're launching Flutter 3 today as part of the Google I/O keynote. Flutter 3 completes our roadmap from a mobile-centric to a multi-platform framework, delivering support for macOS and Linux desktop apps, as well as improvements to Firebase integration, new productivity and performance features, and support for Apple Silicon.

The journey to Flutter 3

We started Flutter as an attempt to revolutionize application development: combining the iterative development model of the web with hardware-accelerated graphics rendering and pixel-level control that was previously the preserve of games. In the four years since Flutter 1.0 beta, we have gradually built on these foundations, adding new framework features and new widgets, deeper integration with the underlying platform, a rich package library and many performance and tooling improvements .

As the product matures, more and more people start building applications with it. Today, over 500,000 apps are built with Flutter. Analysis from research firms like data.ai, as well as public reviews, shows that Flutter is used by customers in many segments: from social apps like WeChat to financial 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 agencies like the Brazilian government.

Today, more than 500,000 apps are built with Flutter.

Developers tell us that Flutter helps build beautiful apps faster on more platforms. in our latest user study.

• 91% of developers believe that Flutter reduces the time to build and publish applications.
• 85% of developers think Flutter makes their apps prettier than before.
• 85% believe that Flutter makes their apps available on more platforms than ever before.

In a recent blog post by Sonos discussing their revamped setup experience, they highlighted the second issue.

"It's no exaggeration to say that [Flutter] unleashes a level of 'advanced' unlike anything our team has delivered before. Most importantly for our designers, new UIs can be easily built , which means our team spends less time saying "no" to specs and more time iterating. If that sounds worthwhile, we'd recommend you give Flutter a try - we're happy to do so ."

Introducing Flutter 3

Today, we're launching Flutter 3, the culmination of our journey to fill the platforms that Flutter supports. With Flutter 3, you can build better experiences for six platforms from one codebase, provide unmatched developer productivity, and enable startups to bring new ideas to full availability from day one. reach the market.

In previous releases, we complemented iOS and Android with network and Windows support, and now Flutter 3 adds stable support for macOS and Linux apps. Adding platform support requires more than rendering pixels: it includes new input and interaction models, compilation and build support, accessibility and internationalization, and platform-specific integration. Our goal is to give you the flexibility to take full advantage of the underlying operating system, while sharing as much of the user interface and logic of your choice as possible.

On macOS, we already support Intel and Apple Silicon, and provide universal binary support, enabling applications to package executables to run natively on both architectures. On Linux, Canonical and Google have partnered to provide a highly integrated, best-of-breed option for development.

Superlist is a great example of how Flutter can achieve a beautiful desktop experience, and it launched in beta today. Superlist offers super collaboration, with a new app that combines lists, tasks and free-form content into a new way to do to-dos and personal planning. The Superlist team chose Flutter for its ability to provide a fast, highly branded desktop experience, and we think their progress so far demonstrates why it's proving to be a great choice.

Flutter 3 also brings improvements to many essentials, improving performance, supporting Material You, and updating productivity.

In addition to the above work, in this release, Flutter can be developed completely natively on Apple chips. While Flutter has been compatible with M1-powered Apple devices since its release, Flutter now takes full advantage of Dart's support for Apple silicon, enabling faster compilation on M1-powered devices, and support for universal binaries for macOS applications.

In this release, our work on Material Design 3 is largely complete, enabling developers to take advantage of an adaptable, cross-platform design system with dynamic color schemes and updated visual components.

Our detailed technical blog post explains these and many other new features in Flutter 3.

Flutter is powered by Dart, a highly productive, portable language for multi-platform development. Our work on Dart in this cycle includes new language features that reduce templates and aid readability, experimental RISC-V support, an upgraded linter, and new documentation. For further details on all the new improvements in Dart 2.17, check out the dedicated blog: https://medium.com/dartlang .

Firebase and Flutter

Of course, building an application is more than just a UI framework. Application publishers need a comprehensive set of tools to help you build, publish, and operate your applications, including services such as authentication, data storage, cloud capabilities, and device testing. There are multiple services supporting Flutter, including Sentry, AppWrite, and AWS Amplify.

Google's app service is Firebase, and SlashData's developer benchmark study shows that 62% of Flutter developers use Firebase in their apps. So, over the past few releases, we've been working with Firebase to expand and better integrate Flutter as a first-class integration. This includes bringing Flutter's Firebase plugin to 1.0, adding better documentation and tooling, and new widgets like the Flutter Fire UI, which provides developers with a reusable UI for auth and profile interfaces.

Today, we are announcing that the Flutter/Firebase integration will be a fully supported core part of the Firebase product. We move source code and documentation into Firebase's main repository and website, and you can count on us to evolve Firebase's support for Flutter in sync with Android and iOS.

Additionally, we've made significant improvements to support Flutter apps using Crashlytics, Firebase's popular real-time crash reporting service. With the updated Flutter Crashlytics plugin, you can track fatal errors in real time, giving you the same feature set as other iOS and Android developers. This includes important alerts and metrics like "crashing free users" that help you keep your app stable.
The Crashlytics analytics pipeline has been upgraded to improve the clustering of Flutter crashes, making it faster to triage, prioritize, and fix issues. Finally, we've simplified the plugin setup process so it only takes a few steps to get Crashlytics up and running from your Dart code.

Flutter Casual Games Toolkit

For most developers, Flutter is an application framework. However, the community around casual game development is also growing, leveraging the hardware-accelerated graphics support provided by Flutter and open source game engines like Flame. We want to make it easier for casual game developers to get started, so at I/O today we announced the Casual Game Toolkit, which provides a starter kit of templates and best practices, as well as a great experience with ads and cloud services .

While Flutter wasn't designed for high-intensity 3D action games, even some games turned to Flutter's non-gaming UI, including popular titles like PUBG Mobile, which have hundreds of millions of users. And for I/O, we wanted to see how far we could push the technology, so we created a fun pinball game powered by Firebase and Flutter's web support. I/O Pinball offers a custom table designed around four of Google's favorite mascots. Flutter's Dash, Firebase's Sparky, Android Bots, and Chrome's Dinosaurs, and let you compete against others for high scores. We thought this was an interesting way to showcase Flutter's versatility.

Sponsored by Google, powered by community

One of the things we love about Flutter is that it's not just a Google product -- it's a "everyone" product. Open source means that we can all participate in it and have a stake in its success, whether by contributing new code or documentation, creating packages that give new superpowers to the core framework, writing books and training courses to teach others, or helping organize events and user groups.

To showcase the best of the community, we recently partnered with DevPost to sponsor a Puzzle Hack challenge, giving developers an opportunity to showcase their skills by reimagining the classic sliding puzzle in Flutter. It's a testament to the perfect marriage of web, desktop and mobile: now we can all play these games online or through stores.

We've put together this video featuring some of our favorite entries and winners; we think you'll love it.

https://youtu.be/l6hw4o6_Wcs

Thank you for supporting Flutter and welcome to Flutter 3!

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