What's new in Flutter 3?

Flutter is a Google-created free and open-source mobile UI framework released in May 2017. In a nutshell, it enables you to develop a native mobile app using only one codebase. You can design two different apps using the same programming language and codebase (for iOS and Android).

The Benefits and Drawbacks of Using Flutter:

There are benefits and drawbacks to employing technology, like with any other. I will go through several crucial points about Flutter, both positive and bad, to help you figure out when it'll be useful.

Flutter’s Advantages:

Flutter allows you to make changes to your app in real-time, a godsend for problem fixes.

Flutter-based apps have an extremely smooth performance, which allows for a wonderful user experience design.

Quality assurance and testing take substantially less time with a single code base.

Flutter allows you to develop quickly and efficiently.

Flutter's Drawbacks:

Flutter-based apps are typically large and complex.

Browsers do not currently support Flutter-based apps. This implies you won't be able to use any web apps.

Flutter is well-liked, but it hasn't been around long enough to amass a large resource base. As a result, your team will have to create a lot of fresh content.

Dart is a lesser-known programming language, yet it is necessary to master it to work with Flutter.

Why is It Important to Learn Flutter?

Although Flutter is a newer cross-platform framework, more and more firms choose it over Xamarin, Cordova, and React Native.

The following are some of the major reasons why development teams select Flutter:

Increased Productivity:

It saves time and resources to use the same codebase for iOS and Android. Flutter's native widgets help cut down on testing time by assuring that there are few to no difficulties with multiple OS versions.

Simple to Learn:

Flutter enables developers to create native mobile apps without the need for OEM widgets or a lot of code. Together with Flutter's beautiful user interface, this simplifies developing mobile apps.

Android Studio and VS Code Both Support It:

Flutter is supported by several different integrated development environments (IDEs). Android Studio (IntelliJ) and VS Code are the two most popular code editors for this technology. Android Studio is a full-featured program that includes everything you need. You'll need to download the Flutter and Dart plugins to get started. VS Code is a little program with many customization options thanks to marketplace plugins.

Excellent Performance:

According to users, it's tough to tell the difference between a Flutter app and a react native mobile app.

Cost-Effective:

Developing iOS Apps and Android apps from the same codebase is the same as developing two apps for one price.

Excellent Documentation and a Supportive Community:

Thanks to its extensive documentation and easy-to-follow use cases, Flutter provides many resources to address your questions. Flutter users can also exchange ideas through community hubs like Flutter Community and Flutter Awesome.

When There is a Need to use Flutter?

There are a few situations where Flutter is the ideal option. Take this with a grain of salt, as each project's requirements are unique. To help choose your tech stack, you can always organize a free product consultation with one of our developers. Let's look at the greatest Flutter scenarios now:

1. If you Need your App to be Ready Quickly or If You're Working on an MVP:

The point is that Flutter makes it possible to create an application in a very short amount of time. It is a cross-platform SDK, but it also includes a builder tool and a variety of UI widgets. This allows for lightning-fast code creation, bug fixes, and testing. Overall, if you're short on time, Flutter is a must-have. The same is true when it comes to creating an MVP. Perhaps you'll need it for your pitch, or you'll need to distribute it to your users and begin testing. Flutter is ideal for creating MVPs that are fluid, snappy, and simple to use.

2. When a Complex User Interface is Required:

Flutter gives you complete control over every pixel on the screen. Furthermore, your app will look the same on newer and older smartphones. With this SDK, you can create complex, eye-catching UIs that won't degrade the app's performance. So, if you're working on something that requires some extra attention in terms of the user experience, Flutter is the way to go.

3. When You Need Your App To Perform Like A Pro:

Flutter, unlike React Native, does not require a JavaScript bridge, making it faster and more performant. Flutter-based apps have been shown to operate better in latency, cutting, and other issues. If speed and performance are important to you, Flutter is the way to go.

4. When You're Under a Lot of Time Constraints:

Flutter makes writing code very quick, and using it speeds up the entire program development process. It's not only enjoyable to work with for developers, but the widgets make developing even complex UIs much easier. The Hot Reload functionality also makes it very simple to repair errors, make adjustments, and experiment. Flutter can also help you save time when it comes to testing. Overall, if speed is important to you, Flutter is an excellent option.

Flutter 3:

Flutter 3 concludes our efforts to expand the platforms that Flutter supports. Flutter 3 enables developers to create attractive experiences for six platforms from a single codebase, increasing developer efficiency and allowing startups to offer innovative ideas to the complete addressable market from day one. It is hardly an exaggeration to state that Flutter has performed miracles thus far. We'd have to walk kilometers together to keep talking about when Flutter was released to transform the app development arena! Whether it's combining the web's iterative development process with hardware-accelerated graphics rendering or pixel-level control, which were previously only available in games.

Since the Flutter 1.0 beta four years ago, Google has been steadily improving these foundations by introducing additional frameworks and widgets and better integration with the underlying platforms. All of this is in addition to a large package library and several performances and tooling enhancements.

As Google's innovation continued to set standards, more sectors began to invest in it, creating apps that pushed the total number of apps over 500,000.

What's New in Version 3 of Flutter?

On all desktop platforms, full support for international text input is available:

International text input, including third-party input methods such as Sogou and Google Japanese Input, is fully supported on all three desktop platforms, including languages that employ text input method editors (IMEs) such as Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.

Windows 7/8 is being phased out for development:

We've raised the recommended Windows version for development to Windows 10 with this release. While previous versions (Windows 7, Windows 8, and Windows 8.1) are not blocked from development, Microsoft no longer supports them, and we only provide restricted testing on them. We will continue to provide 'best effort' support for earlier versions, but we strongly advise you to upgrade.

Support for various refresh rates on iOS:

On iOS devices with ProMotion displays, such as the iPhone 13 Pro and iPad Pro, Flutter now supports variable refresh rates. Flutter apps can now render at refresh rates up to 120 Hz on these devices, up from 60 Hz before. This results in a more fluid experience when performing quick motions like scrolling.

Updated Gradle version:

When you use the Flutter tool to build a new project, you'll see that the created files now use the most recent versions of the Gradle and Android Gradle plugins. You must manually update the versions of existing projects to 7.4 for Gradle and 7.1.2 for the Android Gradle plugin. Flutter web now automatically finds and uses the ImageDecoder API in browsers that support it. Most Chromium-based browsers (Chrome, Edge, Opera, Samsung Browser, and others) have implemented this API today.

The new API uses the browser's built-in image codecs to decode images asynchronously off the main thread. This improves image decoding by 2x and never pauses the main thread, eradicating all jank caused by images previously.

Impeller:

On iOS and other platforms, the team has been hard at work on a solution to alleviate early-onset jank. On iOS, you may try out an experimental rendering backend called Impeller with the Flutter 3 release. Impeller precompiled a smaller, simpler set of shaders during engine build time so that they don't compile while an app is running, which has been a key source of jank in Flutter. The Impeller is not yet ready for manufacturing and is far from complete. We haven't implemented all of Flutter's features yet, but we're happy enough with its fidelity and performance in the flutter/gallery app that we're willing to share our efforts. The slowest frame in the Gallery app's transition animation is about 20 times faster.

Enhancements to Performance:

Flutter's engineering team has taken performance enhancement to the next level by benchmarking to assess the advantages of optimization. Most crucially, the opacity animation performance for simple case scenarios has been enhanced. When an Opacity widget consists of a single drawing primitive, the save layer method is normally skipped, and Opacity is called instead.

The Flutter 3 release adds a technique that forecasts and estimates the rendering picture complexity based on the cost of the drawing operations. This is a technique for reducing memory usage without affecting the performance of a Flutter app. Finally, we promised you bonus features, and here they are. Let's look at these add-on features, which are the icing on the Flutter 3 cake.

Android's inline ads:

When you use the package, you should see an improvement in user-critical interactions like scrolling and page transitions. This is especially visible in gadgets that are popular in developing countries. The best part is that no changes to the code are necessary! Flutter now asynchronously composes Android views under the hood, also known as platform views. This eliminates the requirement for the Flutter raster thread to wait for the Android view to draw. Instead, the Flutter engine uses an OpenGL texture that it controls to render the view on the screen.

Support for the MacOS System Menu Bar and Menu Cascading:

Fresh inputs for platform-specific integration, interactive models for compilation to develop support, enable accessibility, and internationalization are among the new Flutter 3 features.

The update's goal is to give users the ability to use the operating system more successfully by sharing optimal UI and logic based on their needs. Flutter's most recent capabilities cater to platform support in addition to pixel rendering.

Excellent Support:

The shift to Material Design 3, a Google in-house design language, is one of the top highlights in our what's new in Flutter 3 conversation. The Flutter team has created a flexible cross-platform design system to help you turn your Flutter app into a stunning interactive experience.

Flutter Firebase:

To assist you in operating, producing, publishing and developing your Flutter apps, you'll need a full collection of toonals. Data storage, authentication, device testing, and cloud functionality are examples of these services. Firebase, AWS Amplify, Sentry, and AppWrite are just a few of the third-party connections available in Flutter. Google's backend platform for building mobile and online applications is called Firebase. The Flutter Firebase integration has been announced by the Flutter team, enabling a fully supported core portion of the offering.

Toolkit for Flutter's Games:

The Flutter team has focused on casual gamers this time, releasing a simple casual games toolkit. It comes with a beginning set of templates, ad credits, and cloud services. Flutter engineers have designed a fun pinball game that uses Firebase and Flutter's web capabilities to demonstrate the new Flutter 3 update's versatility.

Conclusion:

The community deserves all appreciation for doing such a fantastic effort to help Flutter achieve prominence and innovation so that it can continue to assist businesses of all shapes and sizes worldwide. We hope you enjoyed reading our blog article about what's new in Flutter 3 as much as we did. Flutter's future appears bright and promising to create engaging app experiences.