The long awaited initial stable release of Google’s Flutter framework has finally arrived. Today at the Flutter Live keynote, Google is announcing the release of Flutter 1.0, just 10 months after the initial beta was revealed.
Developing cross-platform apps can be a mess of non-native code, so Google set out to attempt to solve this issue with a unified toolkit that integrates directly with your editor of choice. By integrating directly with Android Studio, Xcode, Visual Studio Code, or the development environment of your choice, Flutter 1.0 creates a faster development experience that allows you to unify your UI design across platforms. With support for features like Stateful Hot Reload, integrated tooling, a reactive framework design, and a substantial selection of widgets, Flutter has all the necessary pieces to accelerate development.
Flutter 1.0 runs smoothly thanks to its use of Dart 2.1 and the Skia graphics engine, which is designed to support jank free applications, even on potential future 120 Hz phones, with native compilation for both 32 bit and 64 bit ARM processors. Over the past couple months, Google has put substantial work into preparing Flutter’s widget library to have extensive support for both Material Design and Apple style “Cupertino” widgets, to ensure a modern look on the main mobile platforms.
All this has come together to create an open framework with substantial community support, which has grown into being one of the most active projects on GitHub. We’re excited to see how Flutter grows, especially now since the first stable release is being accompanied by increasing interest from major app companies, with multiple major applications beginning to adopt Flutter 1.0.
The new Add To App functionality in Flutter 1.0 in particular will have a substantial impact on Flutter adoption, as it makes it easier to, well, add Flutter to existing apps. The functionality enables you to smoothly continue development while integrating Flutter’s features at your own pace.
Google’s work to modularize Flutter doesn’t stop there however. Those development efforts also enables the creation of Platform Views, which lets you bring native platform controls directly into a Flutter application.
While Flutter 1.0 is a major milestone, Google has no intention of stopping here. Keep an eye on Flutter’s development channel over the next couple months, as now that the first stable release is out, Google can begin to turn their attention to Flutter’s future functionality.
Check out the Getting Started Guide to start designing apps with Flutter today!
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