In 2021, Flutter will be officially released in the 2.X series. Earlier this year, The release of Flutter 2 opened a new “pattern”, adding a fifth feature to Flutter — portability. To officially “upgrade” Flutter from a mobile framework to a “portable framework”, the goal is to allow Flutter applications to run essentially unchanged on multiple platforms. With Flutter, developers can create beautiful, fast, and portable applications for any platform. In March, Flutter began to expand to desktop, foldable and embedded devices, in addition to the stable release of Flutter for the Web platform. The accompanying release of Dart 2.12 provides robust air safety and FFI production level support. Dart is the “secret weapon” behind Flutter. Many of the “bright points” of Flutter we have mentioned are actually largely due to Dart: Dart FFI was developed to support the “portability” of Flutter 2, as well as the performance enhancements of Flutter 2.8, which were introduced over time.
The I/O conference was held online in late May, and the stable versions of Flutter 2.2 and Dart 2.13 were released. In addition to the evolving Web support, Flutter has also seen a number of performance improvements on mobile platforms and is expanding from the base side to other platforms for Flutter enhancement. Flutter 2.2 focuses on improving the development experience. New projects automatically enable robust air safety by default. DevTools and IDE add-ons for Flutter have been improved and updated. Dart 2.13 adds more updates to air safety and introduces a much-anticipated new feature called “type aliasing.”
One of the most important players in the Flutter ecosystem is the Dart packages released around Flutter, which greatly help developers build Flutter applications. FlutterFire is an official collection of add-ons for Flutter applications that integrate with Firebase services. FlutterFire has also handed over some of its own add-ons to the community for Flutter maintenance. This shows that Flutter is not just a project of Google’s engineering team. The whole community contributes continuously to Flutter. Toyota, Canonical, Samsung, SONY, and Microsoft all continue to contribute to Flutter, in addition to the contributions made by members of the developer community. Flutter is not only for developers, but also for designers. Adobe XD is a UI/UX design and collaboration tool. You can easily convert your design into space-safe Flutter code using the XD-to-Flutter plugin. During I/O, the Flutter team, in collaboration with the VGV team, also released and opened source a Web application “Flutter Photo Booth”, built using Flutter and Firebase, as a sample application. Developers can learn how to build a good camera experience, optimize the Web experience, and use Firebase for business logic.
In September 2011, Flutter was updated to version 2.5. Dart was released as version 2.14. This builds on some of the previous work, with important performance and tool improvements, as well as Material You support. Dart support for Apple chips has been officially released in stable release channels since this release, with the addition of a number of shared code Lint tools and the scoring engine on Pub. dev using some of the Lint rules. The Package publishing tool also supports identifying and using.gitignore to declare what to ignore, avoid uploading useless code snippets, and so on. With the release of Dart air safety features, many application developers and package developers have followed suit and implemented robust air safety features. In addition to steadily updating the performance and development experience of Flutter mobile, Flutter Web has also published a product roadmap that aims to make The Experience of Flutter applications on the Web more natural. The Flutter team relies almost entirely on GitHub and other open source platforms for collaboration. All processes and code improvements are open and transparent to the community. Therefore, we strive to encourage local developers to contribute to the global community and make their voices heard in every developer survey. Many new features and improvements are published on GitHub Issue and open for feedback. The more feedback and interaction there is from developers, the more the Flutter team will pay attention and devote resources to solving them.
From the perspective of the number of applications on the Play store, the number of Flutter applications increased from 150,000 + in the first quarter of this year to 200,000 + in the second quarter of this year. Meanwhile, from April to May of this year, more than one eighth of the new applications on the Play store were built with Flutter. The number of Flutter apps on the Play store almost doubled to 375,000 + apps at the end of 2011 compared to q2. These numbers testify to the popularity of Flutter and its growing adoption and love by developers. Developers’ adoption and love of Flutter is also reflected in many developer reports. According to a SlashData report, Flutter is now the most popular cross-platform development framework, with 45% of developers surveyed choosing Flutter. RedMonk’s ranking mentions a “significant increase in Dart”; The StackOverflow developer survey revealed Dart as the # 7 favorite programming language and Flutter as the # 2 favorite framework. According to JetBrains 2021 Developer Ecosystem Status Report, Flutter continues to grow in popularity among cross-platform mobile framework choices, surpassing React Native as the most popular cross-platform mobile framework. Other companies and apps that use Flutter include BMW, ByteDance, Didi, eBay, Grab, Greggs, Shell, Norton, Philips Hue, PUBG, SHEIN, Trip.com, WeChat, etc. (* in no particular order). By the end of 21st, there were more than 3 million Flutter developers worldwide, and Flutter has evolved from its original “portable UI toolkit” to “a UI platform for ambient computing”.
The last stable release of Flutter 2.8 and Dart 2.15 in 2021 focuses on mobile platform performance. Due to the redesign and implementation of the WAY the ISOLATE in Dart programming language works, This reduces the memory consumed by the ISOLATE by up to 100 times. This improves Flutter startup performance and memory usage. The new version of DevTools adds Enhace Tracing, a feature for diagnosing costly Widget building, layout, and drawing operations that cause UI lag. On the PlatformView side of the Web, version 2.8 will reuse the canvas created before the PlatformView to improve performance and reduce scroll lag. Around the Package ecosystem, there are a number of firebase-related add-ons, as well as add-ons for the Google Mobile AD SDK, and you can use some of the Firebase add-ons and other packages directly from the DartPad tool. 2.8 also takes a big step forward in supporting Flutter desktop applications. The official website has recently invited applications for Flutter desktop applications from developers around the world to expand Flutter test coverage and provide more assurance for Flutter desktop support.
Looking back to 2021, Flutter has a strong momentum and great potential. Looking forward to 2022, Flutter is full of confidence. In particular, there will soon be a new Product update for Flutter, which is for Windows desktop application developers. It will be released on February 4th, China time. We will be watching and Posting the latest information about Flutter.
The Lunar New Year is coming. I wish all the Flutter developers a happy New Year and a prosperous Year of the Tiger! May all the bad things disappear, may the order of the world be restored as soon as possible, and we be free to see and hug the people we want to see. I sincerely wish all readers, their families and friends good health and happiness!
We have prepared two new Flutter red envelope covers for you this year, one is Dash Tiger hat and the other is Dash Spring Festival (which can be collected via the red envelope collection page). Last year’s three bald little guys will also return for a limited time. We wish you all a prosperous and successful Year of the Tiger!
