Flutter 2.0: Sound Null Safety and Flutter Web in Stable Version
In the March of 2021, the Flutter team released an important release for Flutter developers called Flutter 2.0, which covered Null Safety features on the dart language.
This means developers can prevent null error crashes and other common reasons for apps to crash before they happen. They can handle all runtime null errors and app crashes caused in compile time. They can use the (? and !) operator sign if needed.
Adaption in Sound Null Safety
- Sound Null Safety is a valuable and significant addition to the dart language.
- Errors and common app crashes are caught during the app's development.
- That helps to prevent app crashes and null errors on production.
- More than 1,000 null safe packages are published in pub dev.
- Dart, Flutter, Firebase, and Material teams also updated on Null safety.
Adaption in Web
- Now Flutter Web is in a stable channel from the beta.
- After this release, we can run our code on three different platforms named Android, iOS and Web.
- The Flutter team focuses on performance and fidelity improvements in this stable Web release.
- In the HTML renderer, they added a CanvasKit-based renderer.
- Introduced Link widget for the web app.
Flutter for Desktop
In this release, the Flutter team announced that Flutter desktop support is available in the stable channel for desktop lovers. This is a "beta snapshot" preview release for the developer. If you want to develop a desktop app from Flutter, you can just try it.
Features
- Text selection pivot points
- Handle propagation of a keyboard event if once it's been handled
- Enable dragging on long press
- TextField and TextFormField widgets are added for Materials and Cupertino
- Also, the grab handle was added to the ReorderableListView widget.
- Scrollbar updated for form-factor and others.
- Page up and page down on the scrolling page
- Command Line argument handled
- Updated docs for the Flutter desktop
Flutter 2.2: Polish and Optimization
In May 2021, the Flutter team announced Flutter 2.2 for the developers with various new features or bug fixes. You are easily able to download and upgrade previous code to the latest one with the help of official Flutter documentation.
Adaptions in Flutter 2.2
- Updates on Android, iOS and Web with new materials icons.
- Improvements in text handling, scrollbar behaviour and mouse cursor
- Flutter 2.2 adapt the Dart 2.13 release
- Type aliases
Web Updates on Flutter 2.2
- New service worker-loading mechanism.
- Fixes double downloading issues on main.dart.js.
- Improvements in web renderers for both HTML and CanvasKit.
- RenderObject DOM tree and semantic properties to Aira.
- Improved semantics node debug tree with a command line flag.
- DevTools supports the layout explorer
iOS Adaptions on Flutter 2.2
- Smoother page transition in Cupertino
- Improvement in development performance
- Improvement in iOS app installation time in the development phase
Adaptions on platform adaptive apps by using Flutter 2.2
- More materials icons are available in material guidance,
- Improved text handling
- Automatic scrolling behaviour added
- Mouse cursors over text spans added
- Improvement in iOS shader compilation
- Android deferred components with AOT
- Flutter windows UWP alpha released for the desktop lover
- Support for targeting ARM64 Linux by Sony
- Introduce the Flutter ecosystem and tooling
- Update on Flutter dev tools
- Check the Firebase app and Flutterfile updates
- IDE plugins update
Flutter 2.5: Dev Tools Updates With New App Template and Many More
In September 2021, the Flutter team announced another release known as Flutter 2.5, covering performance improvements and tooling improvements, dev tools updates, new material support, new app temples for the developer, and more.
What's new on Flutter 2.5
- Full-screen support for Android
- More material you (v3) support
- Switchable keyboard shortcuts
- Improvement in widget Inspector
- New dependence support for VS code projects
- New support for test runs in IntelliJ and Android Studio
Performance Improvements in Flutter 2.5
- Deep work on iOS shader warmup, Async tasks, GC and Message passing
- Reducing iOS jank,
- Improved the latency when sending the message between Dart and Objective-C, and Swift
- Improved the latency when sending the message between Dart and Java and Kotlin
- In this release, Flutter apps built on Apple Silicon M1 Macs run natively on ARM iOS simulators.
- This release comes with Dart 2.14
- Full screen, Material You and text editing shortcuts added on Framework 2.5
- Plugin improvements
- Addition in Flutter dev tools for performance, widget inspector and polish
- Integration test cases, test coverage added
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