Flutter continues to change the way we develop cross-platform applications. We now have one more major Flutter release which focuses on game development, performance enhancements and, of course, developer productivity
The new release comes with the resolution of almost 20,000 issues, which is a huge feat in itself. This release focuses majorly on the application runtime performance and first release of Flame – a 2D module for game development on Flutter. It marks Flutter as the most popular multi-platform toolkit with a huge ecosystem of packages and tools supporting it.
Let’s explore some of the top features announced by Flutter in this release.
Faster runtime performance
Leveraging its experience with large Google apps like Google Pay, Flutter worked on better performance optimization. The release includes high startup performance ensuring consistent results even when constrained by network bandwidth or other initialization costs.
Apart from this, memory usage particularly on memory-constrained devices has been worked upon. This implies simply updating your Flutter application to use Flutter 2.8 will make it faster and ensure less memory usage.
An easier process to connect apps to back-end services
Flutter 2.8 provides an easier approach to connect to Firebase, Google Cloud, and other back-end services. It adds production-grade support for Google Ads and major upgrades to the camera and embedded web plugins.This means that you can now focus more on building a great User experience on the app side, while putting the hard backend work on Google and Firebase more easily
Dart version 2.15
Flutter has always invested in providing better developer productivity. Contributing to it, this release includes a new-sign widget that uses Firebase to handle authentication. This widget covers all the edge cases of user sign-in.
It takes care of the two-factor authentication, reset passwords, and the complexities of supporting Google, Apple, Twitter, or Facebook as an authentication provider. Such features simply amplify how developers build apps with the best low-code and flexible solutions.
Game development with Flame
The release includes the 1.0 release of Flame, a 2D game engine that is developed on Flutter. Flame is created by Blue Fire, which is a group contributing towards creating open-source packages and plugins for Flutter and Dart.
With Flame, building casual cross-platform games is easier than ever before. It includes core primitives such as a component system, animated sprites and images, collision detection, a world camera, an effects system, and gesture and input support.
Not only this, the release comes with a plan to provide an enhanced core developer experience including language updates, better documentation, and interoperability with other platforms. They also intend to provide stable desktop support as part of 2022 plans
Last but not the least, all of these is made possible thanks to an amazing community and Google’s continued commitment to keeping Flutter the best cross-platform app development toolkit.
Looking for a cross-platform MVP for your next big idea? We highly recommend Flutter. Do reach out to us on hello@citrusleaf.in for more info.