Before starting this article, I expect that you are completely aware of Flutter and other hybrid app development frameworks. But still, I would try to explain the two concepts in the shortest way possible.
What is a hybrid mobile app development framework?
Hybrid mobile app development frameworks are basically those frameworks that enable you to develop applications for different platforms (android, iOS, & web) using a single codebase. In short, you write the code once and publish apps for different platforms giving the feel of natively built applications.
What is flutter?
Like Xamarin and React Native, flutter is also a framework that provides hybrid mobile app development features. Flutter is an open-source framework by Google that helps you build multi-platform, natively compiled applications. It was launched in May 2017. Since then, it has become the second most used framework after react-native. No doubt, the big brand Google being behind it makes it an immense success.
What makes Flutter different from others?
- Development Time: It takes less development time as compared to Xamarin and is almost equal to react-native when you develop using Flutter. So, looking for a quality app in a shorter time? Go with flutter.
- User Interface: Flutter has the best user interface due to its Material Design Widgets. This is one of the lots that makes it different and better than other frameworks.
- Performance: Performance-wise Flutter wins the race as it does not use JavaScript bridge and uses Dart instead which itself is a compiled language. So, your application would be faster as compared to others if it is developed with Flutter.
- Popular Applications: Big brands like Google, Tencent, and Alibaba have been using Flutter for their application development.
What stops you from using it for your apps?
Top 10 Features of Flutter 3.0
Flutter 3.0 was released on May 11, 2022. There were several updates in the framework and tooling, let us see what the top ten key features are added to Flutter in the 3.0 release.
- Casual Games Toolkit: Flutter has added a toolkit to enable developers to develop casual games in an easier and more efficient way. As we all know flutter supported hardware-accelerated graphics since its previous releases, now game development would be a better experience.
- Stability in MacOS and Linux: Now apps over the MacOS and Linux OS have reached stability along with the Microsoft OS. Now one can develop applications for any or all the above-mentioned desktop OS along with IOS and Android mobile apps.
- Web App Initialization: Now it has become easier to customize the launch process of the web apps with Flutter 3.0. You can control how your web app starts. The library is updated in the web platform integration.
- Image Decoding: With the Flutter 3.0 version, the Flutter Web interface will be automatically able to perceive and deploy image coder API, right through the browser.
By leveraging the browser’s built-in image codecs, Flutter Web will be able to decode images asynchronously, which will result in up to two times improvement in loading images.
- Material 3: Indeed, one of the top features of what is happening in the Flutter 3.0 conversation is the change to Material Design 3, a Google in-house design language. The Flutter group has offered a versatile cross-stage design framework to change your Flutter application into a lovely intuitive product.
Material 3 (otherwise called Material You) is the up-and-coming age of Material Design. The massive changes incorporate a variety of framework enhancements, typography upgrades, and updates for many components.
- Firebase Support: Firebase is greatly in use today for different purposes like push notifications, real-time databases, no sql databases, storage, and whatnot. Earlier firebase was not supported by Flutter directly. It took efforts from the developer to configure firebase and Fire Store. Now the integration would be more robust and easier with support from Flutter.
- Dart 2.17: The latest version of Flutter also produces a new update for the Dart SDK, with the new language version 2.17. These improvements to Dart are accessible for all developers, regardless of whether you use Flutter or not.
The hallmark feature of Dart 2.17 is the ability for developers to extend Enums and override its default functions, too. This enables Enums to act quite a lot like custom-written classes.
- Performances Best Practices: The Performance Best Practices page has been rewritten and moved to be more visible. The changes include additional advice on avoiding junk, including how to minimize layout passes caused by intrinsic, and techniques to minimize calls to saveLayer ().
- Flutter Dev Tools: The Dev Tools in Flutter is an incredible expansion. The troubleshooting has become as good as it can be expected.
- Flutter Performance: Last but not least, performance has gone on the upper side. I guess the development team has taken performance things quite seriously. My own experience with Flutter 2.0 and Flutter 3.0 says there is a drastic increase in performance.
In my view, these are the top ten changes that Flutter has brought in its latest release. But these are not the only changes. To explore the details of the new release you can check from the official website by clicking here.
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