By Tim Sneath, Product Manager, Flutter & Dart

Flutter has been updated to version 2.8, with several new features and improvements to improve the mobile and Web development experience. Flutter is also moving support to a stable version on the desktop.

Flutter revolutionizes application development: With a single code base, it can build, test and publish beautiful applications for mobile, Web, desktop and embedded platforms — developers can focus on the products and services they want to build, regardless of which platforms they want to release to. As a high-performance, productive development framework, Flutter can also help developers shorten product development cycles; A code base for multiple platforms.

New features and improvements: Faster and more efficient

The focus of this release is on mobile platform performance. Ideally, excellent performance should be “standard,” but in practice, all applications for large or complex businesses need to be optimized for hardware and system API libraries. This includes but is not limited to, for example, application startup, which may be limited by network bandwidth and other code initialization costs, memory consumption, which may be limited by some devices with limited memory, and graphics rendering performance. We have also been using internal large applications such as Google Pay to improve Flutter performance and provide better tools to debug and analyze application performance. Upgrade your project to Flutter 2.8. Your application should have a smaller memory footprint and a faster startup time.

The latest update also includes features that make it easier for applications to access back-end services, such as using Firebase and Google Cloud. We’ve also provided stable support for apps that can be added to Google Ads, as well as a number of updates to the camera plugin and Web plugin embedding. Dart 2.15 was also released with significant concurrency improvements, new language features such as constructor splitting and enumeration type enhancements, and performance optimizations that reduced runtime memory by 10%.

Another important topic and resource investment was “improving developer efficiency”. Due to features such as stateful hot reload of Flutter, we focused on creating a compact internal loop iteration process for developers. We’re beginning to explore ways to encapsulate more advanced features that developers can use faster and more efficiently, and you’ll see improvements to this goal in future releases. For example, in this release, we added a widget that uses Firebase to handle authentication without worrying about any special use cases, such as two-step authentication, password reset, Don’t worry about the complications of logging in with Your Google, Apple, Twitter and Facebook accounts. Building these features and services directly into the core foundation of Flutter will have the potential to revolutionize application development, combining efficient development with low-code solutions on top of Flutter’s flexible and powerful UI framework.

Use Flame, a Game development framework based on Flutter

For most developers, Flutter is an application framework. But there is also a growing ecosystem of casual mini-games that use Flutter to accelerate hardware graphics.

Today we also celebrate the 1.0 release of the Flame Framework (Flame-engine.org), a modular 2D game engine that uses Flutter. Flame provides everything you need to build games quickly, In addition to the Game loop, core elements such as a component system (called FCS in Flame), Sprite animation and graphics, collision detection, world camera, effects system, and gesture and input support are also provided.

Flame is modular and can be extended using other libraries or packages, such as River for animation, AudioPlayers for music playback and sound effects, Use Forge2D (a box2d-like physics engine), Tiled (tile map editor), Fire Atlas (Spritesheet and Sprite animation editor), etc. Flame, along with its extensive ecosystem, offers a powerful set of services for casual or 2D games.

Flame was created by the Blue Fire team, a team focused on building open source packages and plug-ins for Flutter and Dart. We’re excited to work with them, and if you’re interested in game development, we encourage you to try Flame.

Flutter is gaining momentum

The continuous growth and development momentum of Flutter as well as the prosperity of tools and ecology are amazing. At this year’s I/O conference, we noticed that Flutter was used by more than 200,000 apps in the Play store. Six months later, this number almost doubled to 375,000 apps!

And not just on Android, according to independent mobile analytics firm AppAnnie, Flutter is also used by iOS brands and large apps such as BMW, eBay, WeChat, SHEIN, Philips Hue, Norton, Trip.com and Greggs. On the Web, we also use design tools like FlutterFlow and Rive to make the experience better. On the desktop, Ubuntu’s engineering team is also continuing to build a variety of new experiences with Flutter, including new installers and firmware updates. Even for larger games like PUBG, the Flutter is well adapted to various UI screens.

The building of an ecosystem is not an overnight process, and is based on independent research by various institutions and communities: Statista, JetBrains, SlashData and Stack Overflow, Flutter has now become one of the most popular multi-platform toolkits, thanks to the growing ecosystem of package and plug-in libraries and support for various toolsets.

Looking back and looking forward

This year has been equally tough, and our engineering team has been busy. In addition to pushing 2.8 into the official release, we have rewritten developer tools, rolled out air security and Web support, completed FFI support for native code, added Material You support, and worked hard to improve performance and quality. We have solved and closed a total of 20,000 issues and updated the new Flutter website. Over the past few months, we’ve spent a lot of energy cleaning up our engineering infrastructure to improve engineer productivity and expand testing coverage.

Looking ahead to 2022, first of all, we want to be able to really go out and meet people. We are also investing more in the core developer experience, such as enhancing the programming language, updating documentation and abstracting more advanced features to make Flutter easier to build complex applications. We will also push desktop support to a stable version. And further add Web side features. In addition, we plan to expand interoperability with other platforms to accommodate newer screens. We’re always on the road!

Memories and tributes

We would like to dedicate Flutter 2.8 to the community of Kevin Gray, an engineer from the VGV team who passed away a week ago. Kevin was instrumental in the success of Flutter from the very beginning. He was the developer behind many early Flutter demos, including Flutter’s first customer, the Hamilton app, Developed the first desktop demo app for Flutter and the first Flutter app to be shown in a Google I/O keynote. Kevin was a talented, caring, funny and kind man. We are publicly honoring him and letting everyone know his influence. Without him, Flutter would not be the same as it is now. We miss you and thank you for everything you have done for Flutter.

Kevin has been supporting a good cause called Plan International. The CFUG community donated $280 in Kevin’s name to this project to thank him for his support and contribution to Flutter.