Performance improvements, mobile autofill, a new widget and more!
Our ongoing vision with Flutter is to provide a portable toolkit for building stunning experiences wherever you might want to paint pixels on the screen. With every release, we continue to push towards ensuring that Flutter is fast, beautiful, productive and open for every platform we support. In Flutter 1.20, which is released today to our stable channel, Flutter has improvements for every one of these four pillars.
In the category of fast, we’ve got multiple performance improvements, from the lowest levels of the rendering engine and in the Dart language itself.
To enable you to build Flutter apps that are ever more beautiful, this release has several UI enhancements, including the long-awaited support for autofill, a new way to layer your widgets to support pan and zoom, new mouse cursor support, updates to old favorite Material widgets (such as the time and date pickers), and a whole new responsive license page for the About box in your desktop and mobile form-factor Flutter apps.
To make sure that you continue to be more productive, we’ve got updates to the Flutter extension for Visual Studio Code that brings Dart DevTools directly into your IDE, automatically updating your import statements as you move your files around and a new set of metadata for building your own tools.
And it’s because of Flutter’s openness and amazing community contributors that this release includes 3,029 merged PRs and 5,485 closed issues from 359 contributors from around the world, including 270 contributors from the Flutter community at large. In fact, this marks the largest number of contributors we’ve ever had for a Flutter release. Special shoutout to community contributor CareF for 28 PRs, AyushBherwani1998 for 26 PRs, including 10 to the Flutter samples as part of his Google Summer of Code project, and a14n for 13 PRs, many of which are in service of landing null safety for Flutter (more on that topic soon!). We couldn’t create Flutter without a broad team of community contributors, so thank you!
Each new release of Flutter brings with it increased usage and momentum. In fact, in April, we reported that the number of Flutter apps in the Google Play store had reached 50,000, with a peak rate of 10,000 new apps/month. Now, just over three months later, there are more than 90,000 Flutter apps in Google Play. We’re seeing a lot of this growth in India, which is now the #1 region for Flutter developers, having doubled in the last six months, which aligns well with Google’s increased investment in that region. And finally, Flutter isn’t Flutter without Dart, so it’s great to see the that the IEEE has reported that Dart has moved up 4 slots since last year to be #12 in the top 50 languages that they track.
#flutter #dart #mobile-apps #developer
