Soon after the announcement by Google I/O, Flutter 3 was released on May 11, 2022, with extensive capabilities. The new update brought a lot of improvements and new features in addition to the stabilized support for macOS, Linux, and Apple Silicon.
In this post, we will discuss in detail the new features and updates of Flutter 3 that businesses can make use of. So, get familiar with the new updates before you hire dedicated flutter developers for your project.
Let’s dive in!
New Features & Updates of Flutter 3
Stabilized support for 6 platforms
With the new upgrade of Flutter 3, Google has now extended its support to Mac and Linux platforms in addition to the previous platforms of iOS, Android, and Windows. Businesses can now extend their support to all six platforms from a single codebase.
It ensures you can reach a more significant audience segment and launch your application on multiple platforms. Since all the development is based on a common code, the time and cost to develop an application are comparatively low.
Takeaway – Enhanced customer reach.
Casual gaming toolkit
The introduction of the ‘Casual Games Toolkit’ in Flutter 3 has opened an entirely new vertical of opportunities for businesses. While they can’t expect fully-immersive 3D action games out of Flutter, the upgrade sure has catered to the attention of game developers and businesses looking to create innovative casual games.
The toolkit comes with a plethora of templates for developers to choose from along with guidelines and tutorials. It sure led Flutter towards a new direction along with improved app development.
The all-new Dart 2.17
With the Flutter 3 version, developers can automatically use the updated version of Dart programming language, i.e. Dart 2.17. And with that, they can leverage the various benefits and features that Dart 2.17 offers.
What’s new in Dart 2.17?
- Major support for enum members.
- Super initializers for coding ease.
- Improvements in productivity tools.
- Default function overriding.
Material 3 to develop exceptional UI
The Flutter 3 update is known for extending its support to multiple tools and platforms. Likewise, this Flutter version has also offered its support for Material 3 to let dedicated Flutter app developers build engaging and interactive user interfaces for mobile applications.
They can make use of this cross-platform design system to update various UI visual components, play with dynamic colours, and create unique UI experiences for the users.
Flutter Firebase
One needs to perform a number of operations for building a fully functional mobile app. And the support for Firebase allows one to do so conveniently. This Baas platform (Backend as a service) offers hosted backend solutions, such as cloud storage, crash reporting, remote configuration, real-time database, authentication, hosting static files, etc. And utilizing it can help Flutter developer experts in building stellar mobile applications.
Web updates
Image decoding
The new Flutter 3 web can automatically perceive and use image decoding with the API ‘Imagecoder’ in the browser. The in-built image codecs of the browser enable the API to decode the images asynchronously from the main thread without any interruption.
This assures the image speed increases by two times and there’s no interruption in the core thread at the time. The API also helps remove any junk caused by the previously loaded images. This automatically improves the performance of any content-heavy or image-heavy applications.
Web app lifecycle
The all-new web app lifecycle API in Flutter 3 allows developers to control the bootstrap process from the HTML hosting page itself. It also assists Lighthouse in determining the performance metrics of your Flutter application.
Mobile updates
Foldable phone support
Collaborating with Microsoft, Flutter 3 extends its support to foldable devices as well. Thus, businesses can increase their user base rather extensively and build engaging and productive experiences for all kinds of app users.
iOS variable refresh rate support
For iOS devices with ProMotion displays, iPad Pro, and iPhone 13 pro, Flutter 3 will now support variable refresh rates. Thus, the previous limit of 60 Hz has been changed to 120 Hz. consequently, there has been a noted performance boost as users can witness a seamless experience while executing animations.
Streamlined releases for iOS
With the Flutter 3 update, launching applications on iOS have become easier. Developers can create IPA for building app bundles and XCode archives when planning to launch their applications on Apple’s App Store or TestFlight. In fact, you no longer have to open Xcode again for the application’s release as long as you have already set up the Xcode project settings.
Takeaway
So, How is Flutter 3 Better than flutter 2? With the new version release of Flutter, there seem immense growth prospects for the platform. While the updated software brings a lot of support for new and existing tools, it also featured some new and usable functions.
Clearly, it can elevate the development process and quality of applications with its improved support solutions. And with Google backing the Flutter framework, it is more likely to improve further in the future and enhance the performance of mobile applications.
Summary
With Flutter 3 released in May 2022, many new features and functionalities have been added to the SDK. Here, give it a read to learn more about the new features and updates of Flutter 3.
