Google launched Flutter 3 in 2022. So knowing about Flutter 3, and what sets it apart from the others can be of great help. Flutter lets you build neat cross-platform mobile, desktop, and web applications from a single codebase. Flutter does it all with its easy-to-use programming language, Dart. Knowing about the features of flutter can help if you want to know more about flutter mobile app development for Android, iOS, and more.
What is Flutter?
Flutter, an open source framework developed by Google, changed the scene for creating universal and native apps. Developers now have more options to build faster mobile apps that run on multiple platforms, including React Native and Xamarin. Flutter uses its built-in programming language, Dart.
Released earlier this year, Flutter 3 adds support for native Android, iOS, web, and Windows targets along with macOS and Linux desktop apps. It also includes improvements to fix UI issues.
Features of flutter
According to studies, 90% of developers agree that Flutter reduces the time to build and publish an app. The new enhanced features of Flutter 3 include:
Stability for macOS and Linux
Flutter 3 is the main achievement as it officially supports all six platforms on the stable channel. Windows, web, Android and iOS have been secure and solid now.
In Flutter 2, the Flutter community supported the web and Windows platforms, along with iOS and Android. Flutter 3 adds firm support for macOS and Linux apps. Now you can develop your application on any or all of these platforms using a single codebase.
Flutter 3 allows developers to take advantage of cross-platform benefits and share as much UI and logic between these platforms as possible.
Latest Dart 2.17
Flutter runs on Dart. It is a multi-platform, high-productivity portable language created by Google. The latest version of Dart, Dart 2.17 was released at Google I/O 2022 with new features and improvements, such as:
- Core library API documentation update
- Deep and comprehensive platform integration
- Enums with member support
- More flexibility for named parameters
- Better parameter forwarding for superclasses
- Better productivity tools
Material 3
One of the top Flutter 3.0 features is the change to Material Design 3, Google’s in-house design language. The Flutter group offers a versatile cross-stage design framework to turn your Flutter application into a lovely intuitive product.
Material 3 is the new era of Material Design. The massive changes include many framework improvements, typography upgrades, and updates to several components. Material 3 widgets in Flutter 3 come with highlights, including:
- New buttons
- New app menu
- Variable font support
- Adaptive color
Excellent Firebase integration
According to studies, 60% of Flutter developers use Firebase in their apps. Firebase is a backend service app development platform that provides hosted backend services.
Firebase supports Flutter. With the new Flutter 3, Firebase expanded its support and integrated Flutter as a first-class integration. Developers will see better documentation, tooling and new widgets like FlutterFire UI which provides a reusable UI for authorization.
Firebase Crashlytics
Flutter 3 brings you Firebase Crashlytics. It is a real-time, lightweight crash reporter that helps you track down fatal errors. With Crashlytics, you can gather crash and error details.
Crashlytics is Firebase’s popular real-time crash reporting service for identifying, prioritizing and fixing issues. Flutter 3 lets you take advantage of this by using the Flutter Crashlytics plug-in. It offers several features that help developers ensure app stability.
Games toolkit
With Flutter 3.0, the focus is on casual gamers to release an easy-to-use casual game tool kit. It offers a starter kit of templates and credits for ads and cloud services. So for casual game developers, Flutter 3 has some exciting features.
The game development community can take advantage of hardware-accelerated graphics and the open-source Flame engine to write casual game apps. Flutter 3 also provides guidelines and tutorials for game developers who have a vested interest in it.
Performance improvements
Flutter 3 implies all the better changes for functionality and performance. In addition, multiple pull requests have been merged, giving Flutter a major performance boost compared to the previous version. Some of the improvements made in this latest version include:
- Advanced raster cache access policy
- Experimental rendering backend called Impeller
- The partial color change enabled on Android devices
- Improve performance of opacity animations in simple cases
- Faster average frame creation as UI threads run on higher priority on Android and iOS
Additional Flutter updates
This version has several redesigns. There are some major upgrades, especially for performance. Flutter 3 expands to include several productivity and performance features, such as:
For mobile updates:
-
Foldable support for phone
In Flutter 3, the release includes new widgets and features to create foldable mobile devices. It allows you to create dynamic and engaging experiences with foldable devices. This feature has been developed in collaboration with Microsoft.
-
Variable refresh rate support for iOS
Flutter 3.0 versions supports variable refresh rates on iOS devices including iPad Pro and iPhone 13 Pro. Rendering capability is now at refresh rates of up to 120 Hz, which was previously limited to 60 Hz. Users can now have a smooth scrolling experience while watching fast animations.
Web updates
-
Image decoding
Flutter version 3 includes new APIs for decoding images from the main thread minus sync. This is done through the browser’s built-in image code. Know that this feature accelerates image decoding, ensures that the main thread never blocks, and also cleans up past junk built-up.
-
Web app lifecycle
The new web app lifecycle API for Flutter apps gives you the advantage of controlling the process of bootstrapping your app. Now you can take advantage of desktop support for your app.
What’s new and exciting in Flutter 3?
You will find some more updates on the Flutter ecosystem such as the following:
Theme extension
Now you can add anything to the ThemeData of the material library using the Theme extension. Instead of extending ThemeData and re-implementing the copyWith, and other methods, you can refer to ThemeData.extensions. Plus, as a package developer, you can provide ThemeExtensions.
Advertisements
Flutter 3 supports publisher requirements to create personalized ads and manage Apple’s App Tracking Transparency (ATTT) requirements. Google provides a User Messaging Platform (UMP) SDK that replaces the previous open-source, ConsentSDK.
Introduction to Dart 2.17
Dart 2.17 was announced alongside Flutter 3.0, along with some anticipated highlights that developers have been waiting for. Dart is the secret behind Flutter components, and any upgrades to Dart will aid in working on further development.
Comparing Flutter 3 and Flutter 2
There is a major performance difference between Flutter 2 and Flutter 3 when it comes to running desktop apps.
Flutter 3 lets you build applications for Android, iOS, Linux, Windows, macOS, and the web using the same shared code.
Creating applications for Windows was easy with Flutter 2.10, but neither macOS nor Linux was fully supported by this version.
Things have changed for the better now as Google announced Flutter 3 at this year’s Google I/O, along with support for building apps on both Mac OS X and Linux.
Wrapping it up
Hopefully, you now have a better idea of the best features of Flutter 3.0. Flutter 3 goes from mobile-centric to multiplatform, and offers support for macOS and Linux desktop apps, integration improvements, increased productivity and performance, and Apple Silicon support.
Flutter’s innovative platform continues to benefit businesses of various sizes and capacities. It offers stability on six platforms while continuing to focus on performance improvements. For developers who need to create multi-platform apps, this might be a good time to consider Flutter.
