A roundup of Flutter news at Google I/O
Flutter: beautiful apps for mobile, web and desktop
Published in
3 min readMay 8, 2019
We shipped an almost overwhelming amount of news about Flutter at I/O ’19 this year, and if it’s not your full-time job to track it all, you might be forgiven for missing some of it. So here’s an aggregation of all the big news, as well as highlights from the press coverage.
TL;DR
Flutter expands from mobile devices to support the web and desktop: same codebase, same focus on fast, beautiful experiences with high productivity.
News and announcements
- Flutter now supports the web. Open source, repo on GitHub.
- Flutter 1.5 ships to the stable channel (release notes). Includes preliminary support for targeting Windows, Mac and Linux operating systems. New plug-ins for in-app payment, state management. New samples for ML Kit-based image classification.
- Support for developing on Chrome OS and publishing apps to Chrome OS.
- Dart 2.3 released with new support for UI-as-code features including the spread operator, collection if and collection for; website and package site overhauled.
- New reference customers for Flutter announced: eBay, Sonos, and New York Times. The Assistant team is using Flutter for their smart display platform with Flutter, powering the UI of devices such as Google Nest Hub.
- Updates for the Visual Studio Code and Android Studio tooling extensions.
- Flutter training course published by App Brewery, in collaboration with Google. Thirty hours of videos and labs, at a subsidized price of just $10.
- Flutter Create award winners announced, along with demo reel.
- International community-organized Flutter hackathon on June 1st.
Articles from the Flutter and Dart teams
- Flutter: a portable UI framework for mobile, web, embedded, and desktop
- Bringing Flutter to the web
- Announcing Flutter 1.5
- Dart 2.3: optimized for building user interfaces
- Chrome OS and Flutter: better together
- Performance testing of Flutter apps
Articles from partner teams
- Flutter is all the things (Very Good Ventures)
- Under the Hood with Flutter for Web (Very Good Ventures)
- Flutter Developer Quest game at I/O ’19 (2Dimensions)
Flutter and Dart keynote and session recordings
- Keynote: announcing the technical preview of Flutter for web
- Beyond mobile: Material Design, adaptable UIs and Flutter
- Building for iOS with Flutter
- Building Flutter apps for iOS, Android, Chrome OS and web
- Dart: Productive, fast and multiplatform — pick 3
- Pragmatic state management with Flutter
Demos and Codelabs
- New York Times KENKEN game, built with Flutter for web
- Flutter web sample gallery
- 2Dimensions: Developer Quest game (iOS, Android)
- Three new codelabs for Flutter: Photos API, Google Maps, iOS apps
Press highlights
- “Flutter has grown by leaps and bounds to quickly become arguably the best framework for multi-platform coding across iOS and Android. […] It has frankly been a bit shocking how positive the response to Flutter has been.” (XDA Developers)
- “Google’s Flutter UI toolkit for cross-platform development may only be two years old, but it has quickly become the framework of choice for many developers.” (TechCrunch)
- “Google is fixing one of the biggest hurdles for app developers that not only makes their jobs easier, but also makes their apps and services better to use on pretty much every platform we most commonly use, including Android, iOS, Windows 10, macOS, Chrome OS, and web browsers.” (BusinessInsider)
- “Clearly, Google is trying to make Flutter the best way to create apps of every kind. Whether your app is for Android, iOS, Chrome OS, Windows, Web, IoT or all of the above doesn’t matter anymore, and that’s astounding.” (9to5Google)
- “The updates, which got a lot of cheers when they were announced today […] mean that Flutter in fact becomes a multiplatform UI framework.” (SiliconAngle)
Also see articles from VentureBeat, ZDNet, Thurrott, and others.
