This stable version of Flutter 2.8 represents the hard work of 207 contributors and 178 reviewers, producing 2,424 PRs merged and 2976 issues closed. Generally, developers miss this most important part of a release. There are numbers of feature we can talk about which are announced with this release. Not covering them all but yeah, we will look into the and must to have features in this article.
Apart from flutter’s updated version, this release also came with new dart version Dart 2.15, which includes major improvements to concurrency, new language features such as constructor tear offs, enhanced enumerations, and optimizations that deliver a 10% reduction in memory utilization.
Performance Improvement
- Improved application’s start up time and splash screen time are most eye catchy improvements for developers as well as the users.
- Flutter team has looked into start-up time to get it reduce as much as possible. Additionally, they tested app that has global coverage and over 1 million users i.e., Google Pay. What next then? The results were quite interesting & like, 50% time is reduced when running on a low-end device, and by 10% improvements on high-end devices.
- Profiling the deployed app is the most common check for developers and it must needed feature for every flutter developer. So, now in profile they bring new updates i.e. This release now sends tracing events to the Android systrace recorder if it is enabled at application startup, and these events are sent when the Flutter application is built in release mode.
Web platform views
- In this release, not only Android and iOS is getting performance improvements but Flutter Web improvements are also included.
- Flutter web implements the HtmlElementView widget, which allows us to host HTML elements inside our Flutter web app. If we’re using the web versions of the google_maps_flutter plugin or the video_player plugin, or we’re following the Flutter team’s advice about how to optimize the display images on the web, then we’re using platform views.
Google Ads of Flutter Ads
- As Flutter releases the Google Mobile SDK for general availability in November.
- Now it came up with 5 ad formats to add ads as per our requirements and, includes a beta of a new mediation feature to help us optimize ad performance in better way.
- If we’re willing know more about integrate Google Ads into our Flutter apps as well as other monetization options, check out the new monetization page on flutter.dev.
Flutter with Firebase
- Developing apps in flutter without having a Firebase feature in it is not happing any more & for that all thanks go to flutter fire with coverage of two-third of apps in the market.
- All Flutter Fire beta plugin now moved to stage from beta quality. Plugins moving to stable for Android, iOS, and web include Analytics, Dynamic Links, In-App Messaging, Performance Monitoring, Realtime Database, Remote Config and, the new kid on the block, Installations.
- Big News for Flutter Beginners is now Flutter Fire is enabled in Dart Pad, so they can play it around with firebase features in dart pad only.
- Summarizing it for every flutter + firebase enthusiastic about what we’ve from this release, it’s listed below what make it easier to build applications using Flutter and Firebase:
- All Flutter Fire plugins are graduating from beta to stable
- New support in Dart Pad for several Firebase services
- New libraries to more easily build UI for authentication and live Firestore queries
- New Firestore Object/Document Mapping for Flutter, available in Alpha
Flutter Favorites
- The Flutter Ecosystem Committee has met again to designate the following as Flutter Favorite packages:
- Three custom router packages for the new Router API: beamer, routemaster, and go_router
- drift, a rename of an already capable and popular reactive persistence library for Flutter and Dart, built on top of sqlite
- freezed, a Dart “language patch” to provide a simple syntax for defining models, cloning objects, pattern matching, and more
- dart_code_metrics, a static analysis tool that helps us to analyze and improve our code quality.
- And several great looking GUI packages: flex_color_scheme, flutter_svg, feedback, toggle_switch, and auto_size_text
At the end, just to summarize if, this update comes with great improvements and optimization in Flutter for flutter developers and obviously we know under the hood there is lots of it.
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