Leading UI toolkits for multi-platform development are gaining momentum
Original address: medium.com/flutter/ann…
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Published: May 19, 2021-5 minutes to read
At Google I/O today, we announced Flutter 2.2, our latest open source toolkit for building beautiful applications for any device from a single platform. Flutter 2.2 is the best Version of Flutter to date, and its update makes it easier than ever for developers to monetize their apps through in-app purchases, payments, and advertising; Connect to cloud services and apis to scale applications to support new functionality; It also has tools and language capabilities that enable developers to eliminate a wide range of errors, improve application performance and reduce package sizes.
Build on Flutter 2
Build on Flutter 2, Flutter 2.2 expands Flutter beyond its mobile domain into web, desktop, and embedded use. It is uniquely designed for the world of ambient computing, where users have a variety of different devices and form factors, and are looking for consistent experiences across their daily lives. With Flutter 2.2, businesses, startups, and entrepreneurs can build high-quality solutions that reach their marketable potential, allowing creative inspiration, not the target platform, to be the only limiting factor.
Flutter is now the most popular cross-platform development framework.
A recent mobile developer study highlighted the growth of Flutter. Analytics firm SlashData’s 2021 mobile Developer population forecast shows that Flutter is now the most popular cross-platform development framework, chosen by 45% of developers, increasing by 47% between Q1 2020 and Q1 2021. Our own data confirm this shift to Flutter; In the past 30 days, more than one in eight new apps in the Play Store were built with Flutter.
At I/O, we shared that there are now over 200,000 applications built with Flutter in the Play Store alone. The apps come from companies like Tencent, whose wechat messaging app is used by more than 1.2 billion users on iOS and Android; ByteDance, TikTok’s founder, has now built 70 different apps using Flutter; And other apps from companies like BMW, SHEIN, Grab and DiDi. Of course, Flutter is not just used by big companies. Some of the most innovative apps come from names you may not have heard of: Wombo, the viral singing selfie app, for example; Fastly, an intermittent fasting app, and Kite, a beautiful investment trading app.
Introduction to Flutter 2.2
The focus of Flutter version 2.2 is to improve the development experience to help you deliver more reliable, high-performance applications to your customers.
Robust null-value security is now the default for new projects. Null-value security adds protection against null-reference exceptions, giving developers the means to express non-null-value types in their code. Because Dart’s implementation is robust, the compiler can eliminate null-value checking at run time, providing higher performance for your application. The ecosystem has responded quickly, with about 5,000 software packages updated to support null-value security.
There are also a number of performance improvements: for web applications, we provide a background cache using service workers; For Android applications, Flutter supports a delay component; For iOS, we’ve been working on tools for precompiling shaders to eliminate or reduce the interference of the first run. We’ve also added some new features to the DevTools suite to help you understand memory allocation in your applications and support third-party tool extensions.
In addition, we have polished some important areas, such as improving the accessibility of network targets.
Our work goes beyond the core of Flutter. We’ve also been working with other Google teams to help integrate Flutter into our broader developer stack. In particular, we continue to build trusted services that help developers responsibly monetize their applications. Our new advertising SDK has been updated with this release to include Null Safety and support for adaptive banner formats. We’ve also launched a new payments plugin, built in partnership with the Google Pay team, that lets you pay for physical goods on iOS and Android. We’ve also updated our in-app purchase plug-in, as well as the accompanying code lab.
Dart, the “secret sauce” that supports Flutter, has also been updated in this release. Dart 2.13 extends support for native interoperability with support for arrays and packaging structures in FFI. It also includes support for type aliases, which increases readability and provides a gentle approach to some refactoring schemes. We continue to add integration to the broader ecosystem, including the Dart GitHub initiative and a curated official Docker image optimized for cloud-based business logic deployment.
It’s not just a Google project
While Google remains a major contributor to the Flutter project, we are excited to see the growth of the broader ecosystem surrounding Flutter.
One area of particular growth in recent months has been the expansion of Flutter into an increasing number of platforms and operating systems. At Flutter Engage, we announced that Toyota will introduce Flutter into their next-generation automotive infotainment system. Last month, Canonical released their first Ubuntu release integrating Flutter support, including Snap integration and support for Wayland.
Two new partners showcase this growing ecosystem. Samsung is porting Flutter to Tizen and has built an open source library to which others can contribute. SONY is taking the lead in providing a solution for embedded Linux.
Designers have also benefited from the open source nature of the project, as Adobe announced its updated XD to Flutter plugin. Adobe XD provides designers with a great way to experiment and iterate, and now with enhanced Flutter support, designers and developers can collaborate on the same assets to bring great ideas to production faster than ever before.
Finally, Microsoft continued to work with us; In addition to the work the Surface team has been doing building a foldable experience with Flutter, this week saw Flutter support alpha for UWP applications built for Windows 10. We are excited to see more applications take advantage of Flutter’s built-in platform adaptability to provide a great experience on mobile, desktop, web and beyond.
Build great experiences
We built Flutter to help developers build a great experience. The idea is that app development can get better: we can empower you by removing the traditional barriers to reaching your audience.
We love to see how you put Flutter to work. One example is a veterans Administration program in the United States. The video below shows how their Flutter app helps them rehabilitate soldiers suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=2S-…
There are various workshops, talks, and on-demand sessions about Flutter at Google I/O, and we are excited to share our work with you. Don’t forget to check out our fun photo studio web app built with Flutter, which allows you to create a selfie opportunity with our Dash mascot and her friends
www.deepl.com translation