All You Need to Know about Flutter 2

Flutter Engage- Google organized this event on March 3, 2021, for launching Flutter 2.0. It was a talk of the town among IT experts and a huge community of dedicated Flutter developers. Known as a landmark launch, Flutter 2.0 has a lot of features and patches that make this framework extraordinary for developing robust cross-platform apps. 

Mobile app development companies used Flutter for developing android and iOS apps, but the latest Flutter 2.0 enables developers to build customized apps for other platforms including Mac, Windows, embedded devices, and Linux. What’s more, this version enables developers to come up with customized web apps that can be used on the browser. 

 Flutter 2.0 is a stable version and resolved over 24 thousand issues while merging over 17 thousand PRs from 765 contributors. What’s more, volunteers have reviewed over 1500 PRs. Altogether, this latest version has many new features to offer while ensuring a seamless performance for cross-platform apps.

Key Features and Performance Updates in Flutter 2

Here is the highlight of major features and improvements from the app development company’s viewpoint. Let’s start with the biggest update. 

Web Support

Out of many exciting things happening as part of Flutter 2, Flutter web is one of the most beneficial and stable milestones. With the release of Flutter 2.0, the platform’s web support has switched from beta to stable channel. Support of the web platform has started a new era of app development using Flutter as the reusability of the code has gone to a new level. Now on, Flutter app developers can use the web platform for developing a stable app. 

With the introduction of web support, Flutter has facilitated developers to leverage the benefits of a web platform while building rich and interactive web apps. When you hire Flutter app developers, they mainly focus on the app performance and improvements to rendering fidelity. Flutter 2.0 also supports a new CanvasKit-based renderer in addition to the existing HTML renderer. What’s more, web-specific features including Link Widget ensures that your app running in the browser feels like a web application. 

Desktop

Like the web support, Flutter 2.0 has brought desktop support also in the stable channel with an early release flag. Flutter developers can give desktop support a try for deploying Flutter apps. We can consider it as a “beta snapshot” of the final stable release coming in the latter part of 2021. 

Flutter 2.0 enables the developers to stop the keyboard-based events even if they have been initiated. Also, developers can move various items in the ReorderableListView widget with ease. The latest version has an updated scrollbar widget to offer excellent interactiveness in the desktop app, and developers can use their thumbs for scrolling or page up and down. 

They can also customize the Scrollbar in line with the app’s look and feel using the new ScrollbarTheme class. A grab handle is also present for mouse or touch input. The desktop-based Flutter app shows pages and down tracks. Smoother resizing of Flutter apps for macOS and Windows is also possible using a new version. 

A built-in context menu has been added to the TextField and TextFormField widgets for Material and Cupertino designs for Android and iOS respectively. The thriving Flutter community supports various things including native-like text editing, accessibility, and native top-level menus. In addition to these features, Flutter developers have included command-line argument handling for Flutter apps so that simple things like a double-click on the data file in Windows can be used to open the file in the Flutter app. 

Sound Null Safety

It is an important addition to the Dart language for strengthening the type system. This feature can distinguish nullable types from non-nullable types. In a way, developers can readily prevent null error crashes thereby avoiding the app crash. 

Developers incorporate null checks into the type system to catch errors during the development process itself thereby preventing crashes in the final stage. Flutter 2 supports sound null safety completely. The pub.dev package repository has already published over 1000 null safe packages.  

Also Read- Why Startups Should Consider Flutter for App Development?

Platform Adaptive Apps

Flutter supports Linux, macOS, and Windows in this latest version. It also supports Android, iOS, and the web platforms. Therefore, a question arises in the mind of many developers- How can we write an application that can adapt itself to different sizes of screens, mediums, devices, and input modes. A folio app can give an answer to this question. It is a simple app that can run well on multiple platforms using a single code base. Such an app is known as “platform adaptive” because it adapts well to any platform. 

Google Mobile Ads SDK

Flutter 2.0 has Google Mobile Ads SDK beta version. It helps developers to include native ads and inline banners with the existing overlay formats. A Flutter app development company can easily customize advertisements with the help of Admob and Ad Manager. 

Improved iOS Features

Flutter 2.0 has extended support for iOS with 178 PRs merged, including 23495 that brings State Restoration to 67781 iOS enables developers to build an IPA directly without opening Xcode. Also, the CocoaPods version is updated by 69809 to match with the latest tooling. CupertinoSearchTextField offers a UI for iOS search bar. Other widgets including CupertinoFormRow, CupertinoFormSection, and CupertinoTextFormFieldRow can help developers generate validate form fields in line with the visual aesthetics of iOS. 

Flutter Dev Tools

Finally, the Flutter 2.0 release has changed the community’s name from DevTools to FlutterDevTools especially for debugging. This new FlutterDevTool enables Visual Studio Code, IntelliJ, and AndroidStudio to help app developers with debugging by checking for exceptions. What’s more, the new FlutterDevTool can identify high resolution images with ease.

Concluding Lines

Flutter is a robust cross-platform app development framework. Every version of Flutter brings new promises and opportunities for dedicated developers. The recent Flutter 2.0 release has brought many exciting changes and performance improvements for dedicated developers. It is better to consider either going through the Flutter 2.0 release note or talking to an expert Flutter developer to know and understand all the features. 

Do you want to hire Flutter app developers for your upcoming project? As a leading software development company, Solution Analysts can provide remote developers who work exclusively on your Flutter-based project.