The Google Flutter team announced the first preview version of Flutter, which also marks that Flutter has entered a new phase of development and will usher in a stable version of 1.0. Flutter is designed to allow developers to create high-quality native user experiences on iOS and Android. The development team stated that since Google I/O, the Flutter ecosystem has multiplied, and active Flutter users have grown by 50%. Moving from the beta to the preview also means confidence in the stability and quality of the project, as well as attention to bug fixes and stability.
In this preview release, the development team focused on perfecting edge cases to reach as many users as possible. This includes adding support for 32-bit iOS ARMv7 devices, extending Firebase support to better handle multi-platform reporting and integration, increasing support for more formats for video players, and further improving how to add Flutter widgets to existing Android And iOS app documentation.
Also, the new version of the Flutter extension for Visual Studio Code brings new outline views, statement completion, and the ability to launch simulators directly from the Visual Studio Code.
Flutter’s goal is to solve two critical issues in mobile: one is to achieve the performance of native applications and integration with the platform, and the second is to provide a multi-platform, portable UI toolkit to support efficient application development.
Flutter is also designed for novices and experienced mobile developers who can help you develop beautiful, successful applications faster. At the same time, Flutter also has the following advantages:
- Rapid development using features such as Hot Reload, a new responsive framework, rich controls, and integrated development tools
- Infective and flexible interface design with combinable control collections, rich animation libraries, and hierarchically scalable architectures
- Leverages a portable GPU-accelerated rendering engine and high-performance native ARM code runtime to achieve a cross-platform, high-quality user experience
