At the ‘Flutter Live’ event, Google launched the public stable version 1.0 of ‘Flutter’, its open source mobile UI framework that helps developers build native interfaces for Android & iOS. Flutter went through 6 previews before today’s release.
Google said on its developers blog that Flutter was not replacing the “traditional” Apple & Android app models for building mobile apps. Instead, it was an app engine that could either be embedded into an existing app or used for an entirely new app.
Says Google:
“We think of the characteristics of Flutter along four dimensions:
- Flutter enables you to build beautiful apps. We want to enable designers to deliver their full creative vision without being forced to water it down due to limitations of the underlying framework. Flutter lets you control every pixel on the screen, and its powerful compositing capabilities let you overlay and animate graphics, video, text and controls without limitation. Flutter includes a full set of widgets that deliver pixel-perfect experiences on both iOS and Android. And it enables the ultimate realization of Material Design, Google’s open design system for digital experiences.
- Flutter is fast. It’s powered by the same hardware-accelerated Skia 2D graphics engine that underpins Chrome and Android. We architected Flutter to be able to support glitch-free, jank-free graphics at the native speed of your device. Flutter code is powered by the world-class Dart platform, which enables compilation to native 32-bit and 64-bit ARM code for iOS and Android.
- Flutter is productive. Flutter introduces stateful hot reload, a revolutionary new capability for mobile developers and designers to iterate on their apps in real time. With stateful hot reload, you can make changes to the code of your app and see the results instantly without restarting your app or losing its state. Stateful hot reload transforms the way developers build an app — and in user surveys, developers say it makes their development cycle three times more productive.
- Lastly, Flutter is open. Flutter is an open source project with a BSD-style license, and includes the contributions of hundreds of developers from around the world. In addition, there’s a vibrant ecosystem of thousands of plug-ins. And because every Flutter app is a native app that uses the standard Android and iOS build tools, you can access everything from the underlying operating system, including code and UI written in Kotlin or Java on Android, and Swift or Objective-C on iOS.
At the Flutter Live event, the payment service Square announced 2 new Flutter SDKs that “make it easy to accept payments for goods & services with Flutter”, whether in-person using a Square payment reader or by taking payments inside a mobile app.
