What Flutter has in store for 2020?

Introduction

Flutter has been rapidly showing pace in the tech-market due to its versatility and ease of coding framework provided to the users by Google. This is the prominent reason as to why developers are adopting Flutter as their main toolkit for building applications for mobile and web OS platforms. Due to this increasing adoption, the community of Flutter is working hard to polish their framework to provide even more sophisticated platform to its users. The open-source toolkit for Google UI for building applications for platforms like mobile, web and desktop look promising in the development community. Many feel that it has the potential to replace the native Android development toolkit in the coming future as their team is working on improving the core of Flutter.

In 2020 Flutter is expanding its scope beyond the iOS and Android platforms. Their team is now aiming to reach web applications, desktop apps and even embedding itself. This will mean that a single codebase will be there available in the coming days which will help the developers in creating applications that will cover all the prominent operating systems in the market like Linux, macOS and even Windows in addition to the mobile OS platforms of iOS and Android. This is under the project ‘Hummingbird’ which is focused on web apps as the first step in the expansion.

The expansion of the toolkit to other operating systems will be under the project or the term ‘Ambient Computing.’ Ambient computing can be defined as a set of patterns that enables every device is treated as an extension of the other device. This network or system will help to deliver a seamless experience to the user. This will reduce the burden on the developers as they no longer require to mold the Flutter app development to meet their needs for that specific device. In simpler words, this framework will provide a uniform and seamless experience to the user across all the devices irrespective of their platforms.

With this planning from Google and the release of Flutter 1.12, they have already brought important features adding to its utility and ease of development. These are:

• An updated Dartpad with version 2.7.
• Beta version of web support which will be accessible to the fullest in the 1.5 updates.
• Support for macOS
• Integration of Flutter into the existing application in iOS and Android.
• And few small improvements like dark mode, controlling haptic feedback, shortening of long-press and enhanced scroll for the scrollbar.

To sign off

Flutter has attracted many developers due to its versatility and low level of complexity. Hence, it is fast gaining pace in the market. It takes less time, effort and investment to create an app using this toolkit and its expansion to even further operating systems will increase the rise of app development companies in the market which are developing apps using Flutter.