On Wednesday, the 10th of May, all eyes were set on Google I/O 2023. A major release that would announce the current roadmap for all Google-backed products. During this event, the tech giant also announced the release of Flutter at Google IO 2023 and the roadmap developed around it.
Flutter, the most reliable UI toolkit used by developers worldwide, has been working on creating stable functionality and enhancing its features. This toolkit is a developer's favorite with incredible advantages including high performance and a single codebase (for code and interface design).
The newest additions to the framework will make it extremely efficient and improve the developer's experience. If you are wondering what Flutter has done this time around, let's dive into the advancements straightaway.
What's New in Flutter 3.10: Here's a Sneak Peek
If you want to know all the advancements made to the Flutter framework with the new version release, here's your guide.
#1 Framework-level Features
(Source By: What’s new in Flutter 3.10)
Design innovation is core to the Flutter framework. You will notice newness in the interface design capabilities for every new version released.
- The Material 3 Library has been designed to offer the design specifications for a more visually compelling interface. Google has added newer themes and components that can enhance the designer's outcome. At this stage, the developers must opt-in to the Material Design changes. For this, you should set useMaterial3:true.
- You can use the colors from the chosen theme to enhance the design aesthetics. You can use the colors from a single image or color bar engraved in the theme. These colour schemes can be extremely accessible owing to the new design.
- The Flutter 3.1 design has uplifted the navigation bar too. You will notice a new set of elevations and colours. These will enhance the usability and experience of using the navigation bar.
- The new design enhancements have created a functional and accessible Search Bar and search Anchor. They use predictive text to help you complete searches while saving time. With this new feature, you can create a matching list of search queries within the view.
- TextField: Along with the color scheme and overall navigation systems, there has also been a slight update in the text field. You can use shortcuts to extend your selection within a word block.
#2 Impeller Engine = Better Rendering
(Source By: Impeller: The Next-Generation Renderer for Flutter)
Flutter has been continuously enhancing the developers' graphic creation experience. The graphic is at the core of an interface design. The designers need to build a quick-to-render and performing solution.
Impeller engine aims to offer that service to the Flutter developers. It will exceed the developer's experience with Flutter engines and graphic solutions. The first version of the Impeller engine was tested on the iOS platform. After gaining an incredible performance incentive, this is now a default engine for graphic designing on iOS.
Recently, the creators have added Android preview support for the engine. Owing to the incredible rendering offered by this engine, the Flutter apps are destined to perform incredibly. Whether you use it on Android or iOS devices, it will showcase consistent performance.
One of the biggest advantages of using the Impeller is that it uses fewer rendering passes. It can also reduce memory footprints, which improves bandwidth usage. As a result, it improves bandwidth usage and enhances the loading speed of the applications.
Apart from being a performance enhancer, it also ensures that the application can deliver a particular feature faster. The community backing Flutter is also working on enhancing the Impeller engine. They have introduced patches to better the fidelity of the engine.
This rendering engine will also ensure that the overall size of the application is considerably low. This will help in increasing the downloads for the particular application.
iOS has been using Metal APIs to use the Impeller engine with the application development. Android will use the Vulkan APIs for the same reason. It is known for increased speed of rendering.
#3 Performance Enhancements
(Source By: What’s new in Flutter 3.10)
Good performance can enhance the downloads for your mobile application. We discussed one aspect of performance enhancement in the form of graphical rendering via Impeller. The Flutter 3.10 has worked on performance in several ways.
Fixing Quality Issues: For a while, Flutter has been working on removing the load it experiences. This happens when moving to the next drawable layer. A simple setting of FlutterViews background colour value to non-nil can help speed up the frame rates.
This has significantly fixed the issues related to speed. However, there were issues related to quality and delays that were spotted. This is because of the extra work Flutter undergoes to increase its speed.
With optimizations to DisplayList structure and other rendering aspects, the processing time has been reduced majorly. It has also simplified the different processes, which is important.
The Startup Latency: Latency is known to be a reason for inefficiency across applications. The identifier lookups in the app development can lead to increased latency, reducing app quality. During this version enhancement, the team fixed the issues within the bundle to improve startup latency.
Stability: This was another developer's concern while using Flutter for app development. The creators introduced the GPU driver features to improve stability within the Android app.
As a result, you need to change only those things that require immediate attention. You need not work on the entire screen.
However, this aspect dealt with multiple devices and led to stability issues. The new version has taken down this repaint feature, leading to better quality management and code rebuilding.
Size: The app size remains a concern for the developer and the user. Most Flutter development is dependent on SkParagraph for layout creation, element addition and rendering. To reduce the size of the components and enhance the app usability, they have introduced the manikin and libtxt flags.
#4 Web Integration
When we say Flutter for the Web, let's not misunderstand it for the typical web frameworks. There's already enough framework in that domain. However, Flutter offered reliability and stability in structuring application development by integrating with new-age web technologies such as CanvasKit. These kits are majorly focused on simplifying developer experiences.
With Flutter for the Web, the creators had three main goals- accessibility, interoperability and load time. They wanted to reduce the load time to enhance interactions and make people stay on the web app longer.
With the 3.10 version, the size of CanvasKit has been reduced significantly. This has led to lowered load times for the framework. You can use fonts or graphics with a reduced size that impacts the speed of the application.
- Extends support that helps embed Flutter content into an HTML web page. This means Flutter web apps will only use inline frames.
- Element embedding will allow developers to use Flutter content akin to them using CSS content. You can use it to enhance the transitions and transformations within the application.
- Flutter for the Web has also focussed and improved the overall graphics performance within the application. They have introduced custom shaders that aim to enhance the graphical effects.
(Source By: Flutter Web Renderers: Which One Should I Use? HTML or CanvasKit Renderer?)
#5 API Level Enhancements
Flutter 3.10 has also worked around improving the APIs used in the framework.
- Decoding APNG images was something that developers faced issues with. The current image-loading APIs have been enhanced to help load the APNG images well.
- There have been enhancements made to the image-loading APIs. This will improve the rendering or speed of images to the mobile application. You can easily improve load times for unknown aspect ratios, bounding box constraints and others.
#6 SLSA and Security
For modern developers, it is very important to protect the software from threats and malicious attacks. The framework's security topped the list of all the additions needed to enhance the developer's experience.
The first thing the creators documented was a best practices program. This will help developers understand the security concerns and the inclusions to add. This is an ongoing area. The team has also added OpenSSF Scorecards and Dependabot to secure the major data and repositories within an application.
OpenSSF: It is an analysis tool that will ensure that your repositories adhere to the documented best practices. It will let out an issues list to help you fix the problems.
Dependabot: It is devised to help identify the issues within a project. You can easily monitor them, improve and update them as necessary.
(Source By: Threats and mitigations)
The release workflows have received the SLSA (Supply Chain Level for Software Artifacts) Level-1 certification. This certification is aimed to enhance the Flutter tools and make them usable.
The creators have also enabled security enhancements to improve the build and test environments. It will ensure that all data is logged and audited for future reference. The developers will gain a better insight into the working of the environment and improve the overall development with these tools.
#7 Support for Native Ads
(Source By: Flutter Native Ads)
The Flutter 3.10 has extended support for native ads. With this new support, you can easily personalize the look of the ads within the application, making it more user-centric.
It allows you to create ads from the ground up to sync them with your application design. The design will enable you to create content that syncs with the layout. As a result, the users will get a more personalized and native-like experience while viewing the ads.
You will get several ways to include ads in the apps. These variations include transition screens and overlays.
With the help of Dart APIs, you can use the Dart programming language. Eventually, you can translate the ads to look more in sync with your app's interface. The biggest advantage being you don't need to write platform-specific code for this purpose, which enhances the developer's experience.
#8 Matching Footsteps with Flutter Developer Needs
Flutter, since its inception, has been helping developers create experiential solutions. Google, Windows, iOS and other tech and business giants have extensively used it. The extensive use of Flutter for the Web is also an example of how Flutter is helping developers. Here are a few ways in which Google has explicitly used the framework.
Google Cloud mobile app is one of the solutions from the technology company that can help you monitor your services. You also have Google Classroom practice sets, an exceptional ed-tech tool. It has helped with the development and delivery of the assignments. It also enhances assessments and real-time feedback.
Windows has also used Flutter to build the nearby share app. This ensures a seamless movement of documents and photos between Windows and Android devices.
Flutter is also used to develop the new Play Console app. This is in the beta version. The app can help developers view app statistics easily and build necessary insights.
(Source By: The Ultimate Guide to Publishing Your App on Google Play Store)
How Will It Enhance the Developer Experience?
Flutter 3.10 has created many enhancements to help developers improve their productivity and efficiently deliver the app. Flutter's work on stability and security is commendable. It reduces the developer's efforts to ensure a reliable and robust mobile application.
Each feature and enhancement has been developed keeping in mind the developer's requirements and issues. Owing to the quick rendering, performance enhancements and security best practices, it will help developers release aesthetic app solutions.
Moreover, the API integrations will ensure quick loading and faster rendering, enhancing usability and accessibility.
Conclusion
Flutter 3.10 is a much-awaited release for developers. It will enable them to build more robust and exciting app solutions to further the app's capabilities. Each update to the framework is well thought out and patched through with the community's help.
While most of the rendering updates on Android are not for the view. These updates will further help developers create functional and aesthetically delivered apps.
You need someone reliable and competent to create stable apps with the new updates. Expert App Devs has a team of Flutter developers who are abreast with the latest enhancements and trends. If you want to develop and deploy your app to the market soon, a partnership with us will help. Connect with us to check out all possibilities.
Jignen Pandya
Vice President at Expert App Devs
Responsible for creating a sales funnel, attracting top-of-the-funnel customers, and converting the target market.
