At the recent  Google I/O conference, Google  announced version 2.2 of its cross-platform UI toolkit, Flutter. According to a study, it is now the most popular cross-platform option. Google  concentrated on fixing issues, optimizing performance, and refining existing features in this release. Microsoft, Samsung, Adobe, Sony, and Ubuntu Linux all increased their Flutter support.

Google cited SlashData’s " Mobile Developer Population Forecast 2021" and said that 45% of developers select Flutter now, with a 47% year-over-year growth. This would make Flutter the most popular cross-platform UI toolkit.

Google also announced that  200,000 apps in the Play Store are built with Flutter. That is 50,000 more than at the end of 2020 and shows a growth rate of 440% since December 2019. In those same 16 months, though, the number of Google teams building Flutter apps only grew by 50%, from " over 20" to " more than 30". For comparison: In the 27 months from February 2019 to April 2021, Google’s Angular applications increased 430% from " 600+" to “2600 or 2700”, as Google developer advocate Emma Twersky explained in this  podcast (28:35 min).

Flutter’s ecosystem advanced, too: First, Microsoft has an  Alpha release of Flutter Desktop running on its Universal Windows Platform ( UWP) UI toolkit. Flutter is also getting some attention on Linux and Tizen, with Sony leading the Flutter port  to embedded Linux, and Ubuntu Linux  shipped with a Flutter SDK in April. On the other hand, Samsung is  porting Flutter to smartwatches, TVs, and IoT devices that use its operating system,  Tizen. Finally, Adobe  updated the plugin for its UI design tool  XD that generates Flutter applications.

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