When Flutter announced a keynote after 5 months of silence, we wrote a blogpost about our predictions and desires for this new release announcement.
We were thinking of three main categories for this release:
- Flutter for web
- Focus on Null Safety
- Flutter for Desktop
Flutter 2.0? Say what!
And let’s say all of our dreams came true. A new major version bump release never walks alone, with this release of the 2.0 version of Flutter, a lot of other new things are implemented.
So let’s take some time to walk you through our recap of the Flutter Engage keynote. To start, the 4 key components of Flutter, namely Beautiful UI, Fast, Productive, and Open have been complemented with Portable.
Where Flutter was only a mobile UI toolkit at the beginning, with these changes it is a UI toolkit for any platform that can draw pixels on a screen. You can use Flutter for Android, iOS, Web, and Desktop; Linux, macOS, and Windows. This means it’s possible to export Flutter to any other platform, which makes a Flutter codebase even more reusable.
Even building for Embedded Systems, think of Google Home Hub or the Toyota infotainment will be an option, as long as your platform has a screen and a canvas element because Flutter should be able to draw pixels on that screen. We probably won’t be using this technology soon but we never say never.
With this release, Flutter became even more of a chameleon adaptable to all different platforms.
1. Flutter for web
We were hoping for a stable release for web, and we got it! Thank you Flutter ;) The URL strategy has been changed as predicted, you can now easily adjust your URL and delete the hashtag that was implemented as a standard in every slug. Better SEO support wasn’t part of this release yet but for most of our apps, this isn’t a big deal. Other than that, in this stable release, they made a lot of improvements to boost the performance of Flutter for web.
2. Focus on Null Safety
Hallelujah! Null Safety for Flutter has been released! This will definitely improve quality, makes it possible to create more clear codebases, and will lead to fewer crashes. We said we love Null Safety, so we are head over heels about this new release!
It will improve our codebases and quality insanely and we already fixed a lot of our packages that weren’t supported for Flutter 2.0 and Dart 2.12.0. So we can already start migrating our codebases. Excited much!
Find our stable packages here:
https://pub.dev/packages/model_generator
https://pub.dev/packages/icapps_license
https://pub.dev/packages/icapps_translations
https://pub.dev/packages/locale_gen
https://pub.dev/packages/kiwi_generator
https://pub.dev/packages/scroll_when_needed
3. Flutter for Desktop
This platform was still in alpha, and we thought the beta version would be released but eventually, it became an early stable release of the Flutter for Desktop. Even though, it’s not yet up to its full potential. You can already make builds but Desktop is not yet 100% production-ready at the moment. So although they call it a stable release, we experience it’s still more of a beta release than a full stable one. Flutter confirms this via their Medium platform.
What's next?
Now, this won’t be the last release of Flutter so we can already speculate about the next updates. How do we see Flutter evolving after Flutter 2.0? That’s simple!
We noticed that lately, the focus wasn’t really on the maintenance of the packages anymore but more on making the release of Null Safety possible and fixing the most important bugs. This makes sense but we would love to see some important issues be solved over the next period of time because there are a few bugs that need to be fixed as soon as possible.
Here’s a list of some of the bugs/improvements we would like to see improved:
***Sending an email to Flutter***
- Auto imports for extensions are very important to use them easily: https://github.com/dart-lang/sdk/issues/38894
- Remote code pushes, to release hotfixes in production:https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/14330
- Better Google Maps support, at the moment we notice random crashes, only half-implemented features, … https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/40284
- The merging or checking of pull requests that have nothing to do with Null Safety but are already migrated. https://github.com/flutter/plugins/pull/3441
https://github.com/flutter/plugins/pull/3374- https://github.com/flutter/plugins/pull/3275 - The Text overflow that doesn’t work in all cases https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/18761
What are the next steps for icapps?
Before we start any project with Flutter for web, we need to check how stable this release actually is. So through a lot of performance testing and by creating a good and stable architecture, we’ll be able to find out if Flutter for web is ready for its first icapps project.
But to lift a little tip of the veil, we already have a project in mind that will be our first one to built-in Flutter for web. So stay tuned 😉
Last but definitely not least
Have you seen our recently launched Flutter app, wave-a-cab shining bright in the keynote? There were tears of joy involved, you guys, tears of joy!
This only confirms that we’re on track with this technology and we’re can’t be more fluttered about what’s to come!
You can find an overview of the most important announcements during the keynote in this video.
