Best of luck to Eric on the next journey, Flutter 3.3 is out now

Greetings from the Flutter team and community members in the beautiful city of Oslo, Norway, where we are participating in the Flutter Vikings event held by the community, a two-day development technology exchange event, although offline tickets are sold out, You can also view this meeting online. We also have a lot of updates to share with developers this week.

Flutter's usage and ecosystem continue to grow, with more than 1,000 new mobile apps using Flutter released to the App Store and Google Play Store every day, and usage on both the web and desktop continues to grow. There are currently more than 25,000 packages in the Flutter ecosystem, which further proves the maturity and wide application of Flutter.

Today, we officially release Flutter 3.3. This release focuses on refinements and performance improvements to enhance new features since Flutter 3 was released. Flutter 3.3 adds some new components and fixes bugs to enhance support for the Material 3 specification, as well as support for entering text using Scribble on iPad, selectable text grouping and trackpad support for tablets and helpful new support for desktop developers. This release also includes the release of Dart 2.18, which adds FFI support for libraries and code built with Swift and Objective-C. Apps built with this Dart version will perform better on desktop, web, and mobile. Therefore, we strongly recommend that you run the command flutter upgrade immediately to upgrade to the latest version.

Publish the Wonderous app

We've teamed up with the design team at gskinner to release an app called Wonderous, which aims to show you the power of Flutter - helping you build high-quality, beautiful user experiences that are beautiful in their own right. - From the stunning Taj Mahal in Agra, India to the Mayan ruins on Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula, Wonderous brings some of the most amazing places in the world to your phone, using videos and images to explore the art, The intersection of history and culture.

We hope you share Wonderous with family and friends, and more importantly, as an open source project for developers to explore. As a live application, it provides a complete and comprehensive example of the best practices we hope to inspire and create ideas for intermediate and advanced developers. In the coming weeks, the gskinner team will share more technical details about the app, including accessibility support, animation effects, and performance tips.

Introducing a new graphics engine: Impeller

In addition to the improvements mentioned above in version 3.3, the Flutter team is also working hard on the next generation of the rendering layer engine: Impeller .

Impeller is a major rewrite of the core parts of Flutter Engine, replacing Skia code with a custom runtime environment and taking advantage of modern hardware-accelerated graphics APIs such as Metal on iOS and Vulkan on Android. Impeller provides silky-smooth animations and greatly raises the "barrier" for various multi-platform UI toolkits. The difference in performance is visible to the naked eye, and apps using Impeller can push the boundaries even further than before while maintaining a refresh rate of 60Hz or faster. Most notably, Impeller completely eliminates the need for runtime shader compilation, which is a common source of dropped frames.

While Impeller's existing functionality is not complete, and we are still optimizing its performance, we are currently doing internal testing on a Google-level production application. If you download the just-mentioned Wonderous for iPhone from the App Store, you can get an early feel of how Impeller will work on your app in production.

We're working on an early adopter preview of Impeller on iOS , and you don't need to make any changes to your existing code to enable it, other than adding an enable Impeller parameter (--enable-impeller) to the command. More documentation on the Impeller architecture and how to enable it can be found on our wiki page . Impeller is under active development, and if you want to participate as an early adopter, you will need to switch to Flutter's master release channel to ensure the latest code is used.

We look forward to more applications using Impeller, and we welcome current, reproducible reports from developers using Impeller that impact the performance or fidelity distortions of the current version of the application.

Best wishes for Eric's next journey

Finally, we want to end with a congratulations to Eric Seidel, one of Flutter's co-founders and Head of Engineering at Flutter, who is leaving Google this month for a new adventure. At the Dart Developer Summit in 2015, Eric first introduced Flutter to the world. At that time, Flutter did not have a name and mascot. For most of Flutter's past and present, Eric has been leading and managing Flutter's engineering team. Simply put, there is no Flutter without Eric.

Eric is a born entrepreneur, his "superpower" ("superpower", superpower is also one of Eric's favorite words) is to create and initiate new ideas and concepts, so when Eric decides to start the next adventure During the journey, we sincerely wish him well.

Closing with Flutter 1.0 release Eric's vision for Flutter at the then Flutter Live conference: Flutter is a long-term bet to fundamentally improve and build a great user experience . This is still our vision, as this result has not yet been finalized. Millions of developers around the world trust Flutter, the Flutter ecosystem has thousands of contributors, and the Flutter team at Google is booming. We hope you can continue to join us on our Flutter journey, thank you!