Flutter Warsaw 2020 summary & what our speakers expect from Flutter
2020 was a pretty tough year for everyone. The ongoing pandemic forced us to stop hosting the offline Flutter Warsaw meetups in our office in Warsaw.
But we didn’t stop it totally! Flutter Warsaw #11 was the very first meetup we hosted online, on Zoom. This allowed a much wider audience to join us, so we could all learn together from our amazing speakers no matter if you were in Poland or on the other side of the world.
Statistics
Let’s get to some numbers.
In 2020 we:
- hosted 6 Flutter Warsaw meetups (5 of which were held online),
- held 12 speakers on our stage,
- joined forces with Matej “Reso Coder” Rešetár,
- introduced Package Reviews,
- broke a milestone of 1000 meetup.com members (having almost 1400 members at the time I’m writing this post!),
- surpassed the 900 Twitter followers mark,
- peaked at 157 viewers during Flutter Warsaw #14,
- gained over 600 subscribers on our YouTube channel,
- and we were watched for over 700 hours straight on YouTube.
Flutter expectations
At the end of the year, we asked each of our speakers to answer a few questions related to Flutter:
- How do they like the changes that Flutter introduced in 2020 and which ones do they like the most?
- What do they expect from Flutter in 2021?
- What do they want Flutter to be or to implement at some point in the future?
We split this chapter into two sections. Just below you’ll find summarized answers from each interviewee grouped by the Flutter-related topic. At the end of this article, you’ll find full, original answers to every question we asked.
Summarized answers
Null-safety
Null-safety is something that almost all of our speakers agreed upon to be a really important and awaited language feature.
Thomas Burkhart, Leo Farias, and Brian Egan are happy with the progress made so far with the null-safety in Dart and Flutter in 2020.
Matej Rešetár, Marcin Szałek, Kamil Rykowski, Jakub Biliński, and Felix Angelov are all looking forward to the null-safety support on stable branches.
Web support for Flutter
Flutter already excels on mobile devices, but as for technology, it’s really ambitious. Some time ago, Web support was announced. Today it’s available in the beta channel.
Leo is already really excited about the progress made in 2020 to the Web and is waiting for it to land on stable, together with Brian, Matej, Marcin, and Kamil.
Desktop support for Flutter
Flutter recently pushed support for Windows to the main GitHub repository, therefore announcing alpha support for the Desktop for all three operating systems, including macOS and Linux.
Albert Wolszon as well as Leo and Brian really liked the progress made on that in Flutter in 2020.
Razvan Lung, Marcin, and Thomas are expecting more and more progress for Flutter Desktop in 2021.
Leo actually spoke at Flutter Warsaw #14 where he introduced us to his brilliant tool — FVM, that he developed a graphical user interface using nothing other than Flutter.
Maturity, stability, performance
Flutter 1.17 was an important update in terms of improving stability and performance. Application sizes should be smaller since then too.
Flutter is always developing and getting more and more polished. That’s a very important thing, as with maturity comes more and more developers and companies deciding to use Flutter for their next project/product.
That was a factor worth acknowledging for Felix and Jakub.
Razvan spoke at Flutter Warsaw #11 and he told us what actually makes Flutter so performant.
Krzysztof Sroka also showed us how Flutter achieves the ideal framerate of 60fps at Flutter Warsaw #10.
Thomas is also waiting for better support for iOS widgets.
Devtools
Changes in Flutter devtools were particularly important for Kamil and Matej, that liked the new Network tab as well as the seamless integration with VS Code.
integration_test
Leo is happy with the progress made to the integration_test package.
Brian brought the issue of testing on the floor in his talk at Flutter Warsaw #11.
Data classes
Data classes are a really handy language feature that exists in Kotlin among others. It helps with preserving the immutability and adds some handy methods like copyWith or overriding of the == next to the hashCode. Basically, something that equatable, built_value, freezed, and other packages are trying really hard to bring to Dart.
Both Felix and Albert are awaiting that feature to land, respectively this year and sometime in the future.
Matej explained better what immutability is in his talk at Flutter Warsaw #12.
Other things that our speakers mentioned they liked in Flutter 2020 were:
- Updates to the FlutterFire (Leo)
- The beta of dart:ffi (Thomas)
- Extension methods (Razvan and Kamil)
- Material Design and styling improvements (Marcin)
- Official support for Google Fonts (Matej)
- State restoration (Matej)
- Better i18n support with autogeneration (Marcin)
Other things that our speakers expect in Flutter in 2021 are:
- Multiple return values, tuples, destructing, etc. (Felix)
- Sealed classes (Felix)
- Better Dart support on Cloud Functions (Leo)
Background work in Flutter
In the last question we asked, a better, more Flutter-native way of handling background tasks was a clear winner. All Marcin, Razvan, and Matej told us that this is something that is currently really difficult to implement, and support for this in Flutter would be greatly appreciated.
Our speakers also had a variety of ideas of what they would want to see someday in Flutter:
typedefs for all types, not only functions (Matej)- 3D rendering available directly in Flutter (Jakub)
- Unions in Dart (Felix)
- Stable plugin ecosystem (Brian)
- Custom values for enums (Kamil)
- Over-the-air updates (Leo)
- Hooks built-in in the Flutter core (Leo)
- Better generic types inference (Felix)
At the very bottom of this article, you’ll find full answers to the questions we asked from every speaker.
Talks recordings
All of our Flutter Warsaw 2020 talks are recorded and available on our YouTube channel.
In addition to the ones linked above, here’s the rest of the talks:
- Flutter State Management with Provider — Kamil Rykowski — Flutter Warsaw #10
- Making the most out of your Flutter development — Salih Guler — Flutter Warsaw #12
- Arbify a quick overview of a Flutter localization made easy — Albert Wolszon — Flutter Warsaw #13
- An in-depth analysis of using Flutter in the Enterprise environment — Jakub Biliński — Flutter Warsaw #13
- Cubit: Advanced Topics — Felix Angelov — Flutter Warsaw #14
- Flutter: scroll to perfection — Marcin Szałek — Flutter Warsaw #15
- RVMS — a practical reactive architecture for Flutter Apps — Thomas Burkhart — Flutter Warsaw #15
Interviews
We’ve also interviewed some of our speakers just before their talks where we spoke about their beginnings, how they got started with Flutter, and about some other things.
We really loved having you in our offline meetup and seeing every one of you on Zoom in 2020. We hope everyone learned something, we definitely did!
We’re looking forward to having you at our next meetups, both as the audience and speakers!
If you have a subject you want to talk about, send us a direct message on Twitter at @FlutterWarsaw or fill out Call For Papers form at https://flutterwarsaw.pl/cfp.
Finally, we wanted to thank all our speakers in 2020: Kamil Rykowski, Krzysztof Sroka, Brian Egan, Razvan Lung, Matej Rešetár, Salih Guler, Albert Wolszon, Jakub Biliński, Leo Farias, Felix Angelov, Marcin Szałek, and Thomas Burkhart (in the order of appearance), our hosts Matej Rešetár and Mateusz Wojtczak, our team behind Flutter Warsaw, our sponsors LeanCode, Flutter Software Studio, Reso Coder and Codemagic, and particularly all of you, the attendees, members and readers of Flutter Warsaw meetup and our articles & interviews.
Full answers from speakers
Kamil Rykowski
How do you like the changes that Flutter introduced to us in 2020? Which of them do you like the most and/or think that were the most crucial or awaited?
Every stable release of Flutter is like a … WOW! A lot of new features and resolved bugs where some of them affects directly my daily work. The framework itself got much more polished since I’ve switched my career into it and that’s the thing I’ve honestly wished for 2020. Favourite improvement? Definitely new DevTools with networking support! How can you ever live without it? Oh, and for the Dart itself — the extension methods are great!
What are you expecting Flutter to be in the next year of 2021? What updates do you think Flutter will get? What are you waiting for the most?
Flutter is already the most pleasant solution for building cross-platform mobile apps, so it seems there is not much work to do, right? Nope! I believe that 2021 would bring us the stable and fully functional support for Web platform. I’ve been building recently a homepage for the mobile app in a standard web stack (HTML/CSS) and switching the mindset about layout stuff is simply painful. I would be more than happy to kill that tech switch.
What is the most awaited thing that you would love to see in Flutter? What features do you think it still lacks?
That won’t be a surprise, because it’s probably the most awaited and hyped feature across the whole Flutter community. The null safety. That’s the first thing which I check when the new release hits the stable branch. Are we there yet? Not yet, but it’s just around the corner! I would also love to see a possibility to assign custom values to Enum keys. It’s a tiny improvement from the dev perspective, but definitely a thing which I’m awaiting.
Brian Egan
How do you like the changes that Flutter introduced to us in 2020? Which of them do you like the most and/or think that were the most crucial or awaited?
I love using Flutter Desktop for Development and I’m very happy to see null safety!
What are you expecting Flutter to be in the next year of 2021? What updates do you think Flutter will get? What are you waiting for the most?
I hope we get a fast and stable version of Flutter web. It’s been 2 years since it was first announced at Flutter Live, but I still recommend React or Vue for web apps.
What is the most awaited thing that you would love to see in Flutter? What features do you think it still lacks?
I’d love to see a stable Plugin Ecosystem. I do not think the Flutter teams needs to add features this year, rather I think they really need to focus on that quality of what they’re offering.
Razvan Lung
How do you like the changes that Flutter introduced to us in 2020? Which of them do you like the most and/or think that were the most crucial or awaited?
I like the spread operator and extension methods, it help with development and project structure a lot.
What are you expecting Flutter to be in the next year of 2021? What updates do you think Flutter will get? What are you waiting for the most?
I would expect better desktop support for popular packages and new ways to increase performance.
What is the most awaited thing that you would love to see in Flutter? What features do you think it still lacks?
I’m pretty satisfied with what we have, What I would like to see is more support and for background tasks.
Matej Rešetár
How do you like the changes that Flutter introduced to us in 2020? Which of them do you like the most and/or think that were the most crucial or awaited?
Flutter has undoubtedly grown over 2020 to be a richer and also faster framework. I especially like the Google Fonts package and state restoration (at last!). Dart DevTools built with Flutter and nicely integrated into VS Code are also great.
What are you expecting Flutter to be in the next year of 2021? What updates do you think Flutter will get? What are you waiting for the most?
I can’t wait for null-safety to be stable and usable with all the packages I use on a daily basis. Although I’m not a big web guy myself, having stable support for the web is going to be a big plus for the overall community.
What is the most awaited thing that you would love to see in Flutter? What features do you think it still lacks?
Since I use a lot of union types in my code, I’d finally love to see typedefs for non-function types to get rid of all the nested generic parameters. That’s more about Dart than Flutter though. For the framework itself, I’d like to see a first-party support for executing Dart code in the background.
Albert Wolszon
How do you like the changes that Flutter introduced to us in 2020? Which of them do you like the most and/or think that were the most crucial or awaited?
It was definitely the introduction of Flutter for Desktop. I always wanted to have a easy to use tool for creating desktop applications, but I wasn’t really a fan of Electron. Flutter has some space to take here.
What are you expecting Flutter to be in the next year of 2021? What updates do you think Flutter will get? What are you waiting for the most?
I’m awaiting, probably like everyone, the null-safety on stable! This will help write much more error-prone code and will also result in less hair ripped out of the developers’ heads.
What is the most awaited thing that you would love to see in Flutter? What features do you think it still lacks?
Hmm, the need for data classes is something that the Dart team is aware of. I think that a native support for this would be really nice.
Jakub Biliński
How do you like the changes that Flutter introduced to us in 2020? Which of them do you like the most and/or think that were the most crucial or awaited?
I like many changes in Flutter that were introduced in 2020, but mainly stability changes. With every new update, Flutter was getting more mature and stable. I can say today (in 2021) that, Flutter is a very quality toolkit from Google. Of course, not every change to the Flutter was perfect and I’m not a big fan of “Flutter Android Embeddings V2”.
What are you expecting Flutter to be in the next year of 2021? What updates do you think Flutter will get? What are you waiting for the most?
I’m mostly waiting in 2021 for “Null safety” because it’s important and needed in any big application and is presented in other languages (e.g. C#), but in the same time, I’m afraid that it may lead to the very time-consuming process of code refactoring.
What is the most awaited thing that you would love to see in Flutter? What features do you think it still lacks?
I’m still waiting for the ability to render 3d stuff right from the Flutter. Currently, it is only available by some hardcore tricks and doesn’t result in a pleasing effect. I would love to see some thin layer of abstraction over the Graphics APIs, that would allow programmers to write custom shaders in GLSL/HLSL/Cg and the execute it with common layer from Flutter no matter the platform or operating system.
Leo Farias
How do you like the changes that Flutter introduced to us in 2020? Which of them do you like the most and/or think that were the most crucial or awaited?
Happy with the introduction of null safety and the progress made towards other platforms like Web and desktop. I was also impressed with the work done on the integration_test package and the FlutterFire initiative. I am very interested in the path towards a complete cross-platform language and framework, which I continue to explore. That was the most anticipated to me.
What are you expecting Flutter to be in the next year of 2021? What updates do you think Flutter will get? What are you waiting for the most?
I would like to see Flutter Web make some progress towards improving bundle size and performance. That and better support for Dart on Cloud Functions will help make Dart & Flutter combo one of the most robust stacks out there. I am not sure which updates will Flutter get. The obvious one; work towards production web and desktop, but I expect to be pleasantly surprised with an announcement or two this year.
What is the most awaited thing that you would love to see in Flutter? What features do you think it still lacks?
Unlikely to happen; however, I would like to see Flutter Hooks (or equivalent) brought into the core. I started using hooks, and I can’t see myself going back. Most packages do not support it because it’s not a “first-class citizen.” The holy grail for me would be OTA (Over-the-air) updates. I know Apple has loosened some of their guidelines; however, I believe there would need some significant internal changes at the core to make this a reality.
Felix Angelov
How do you like the changes that Flutter introduced to us in 2020? Which of them do you like the most and/or think that were the most crucial or awaited?
Overall I was very pleased with the changes introduced in 2020. I think one of the most crucial has been the huge mobile performance/size improvements introduced in 1.17.
What are you expecting Flutter to be in the next year of 2021? What updates do you think Flutter will get? What are you waiting for the most?
I am hoping that null safety reaches stable early in 2021 and that as a community we are able to migrate most of the package ecosystem to sound null safety. I think support for multiple returns, tuples, destructuring, and more are coming in 2021. I am waiting for data classes and sealed classes as I think they will be a game changer and eliminate the need to use code-generation to achieve a similar effect.
What is the most awaited thing that you would love to see in Flutter? What features do you think it still lacks?
I am personally waiting for improvements to how generic type inference works because it will greatly improve the development experience in many areas (https://github.com/dart-lang/language/issues/620). I think once dart supports data classes, sealed classes, and improves the generic type inference it will be a massive step forward.
Marcin Szałek
How do you like the changes that Flutter introduced to us in 2020? Which of them do you like the most and/or think that were the most crucial or awaited?
I like how Flutter team is still addressing most annoying problems with the framework, I liked update in Material Design components and styling updates. The coolest upgrade was new i18n support with auto-generated files. Besides that I believe that Riverpod was a great thing that happened to us in this year (thanks Remi).
What are you expecting Flutter to be in the next year of 2021? What updates do you think Flutter will get? What are you waiting for the most?
Obviously I expect null-safety to go to Stable, also maybe desktop/web support going to Stable? To be honest I am super happy with the current state of the framework. :)
What is the most awaited thing that you would love to see in Flutter? What features do you think it still lacks?
Hmmm… Maybe a nice toolkit for background service work with better pinned notification support as I remember that last time it required a lot of native coding.
Thomas Burkhart
How do you like the changes that Flutter introduced to us in 2020? Which of them do you like the most and/or think that were the most crucial or awaited?
I guess the most important one is non-nullability right? I’m a bit ambivalent on it. I see the benefits, but IMHO they are only another step to more code security as you still have to use nullable types for optional parameters and using a ‘!’ at the wrong place will lead you back to null references. The best thing about it is you are forced to think more about what could be possibly null and what not. Ah and I think we also got FFI this year out of beta right? Which is a really important addition to integrate with existing libraries
What are you expecting Flutter to be in the next year of 2021? What updates do you think Flutter will get? What are you waiting for the most?
I expect to see Flutter Desktop in Release because it’s almost there and it’s another strong argument for Flutter. I would love to be able to say I see Flutter Web en par with other web frameworks but I’m not so optimistic there. Overall I expect the framework to further mature and extend its support for iOS widgets. Maybe we will see Fuchsia, which I would love to see. We are promised something big in March, so we will see :)
What is the most awaited thing that you would love to see in Flutter? What features do you think it still lacks?
It’s funny that I don’t think a lot is missing in Flutter, but I really would love to see Dart getting better in supporting some functional concepts. Mainly discriminated unions would be great especially in context of error handling when using null save code.
Authored by Albert Wolszon.
