INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Flutter, Google UI toolkit for building mobile Android and iOS applications, hit its version 1.0 release today
In addition, Google also today announced a set of new third-party integrations with the likes of Square and others, as well as a couple of
new features that make it easier to integrate Flutter with existing applications.
The open-source Flutter project made its debut at Google
2017 I/O developer conference
Since then, it quickly grown in popularity, and companies like Groupon, Philips Hue, Tencent, Alibaba, Capital One and others have already
built applications with it, despite the fact that it had not hit version 1.0 yet and that developers have to write their apps in the Dart
language, which is an additional barrier to entry.
In total, Google says, developers have already published &thousands& of Flutter apps to
the Apple and Google app stores.
&Flutter is our portable UI toolkit for creating a beautiful native experience for iOS and Android out of
just a single code base,& Tim Sneath, Google group product manager for Dart, explained
&The problem we&re solving is the problem that most mobile developers face today
As a developer, you&re kind of forced to choose
Either you build apps natively using the platform SDK, whether you&re building aniOS app or an Android app
And then you&ve got to build them twice.&
Sneath was also part of the Silverlight team at Microsoft before he joined Google in 2017, so he
got a bit of experience in learning what doesn&t work in this space of cross-platform development
It no secret, though, that Facebook is trying to solve a very similar problem with React Native, which is also quite popular.
&I mean,
React Native is obviously a technology that proven quite popular,& Sneath said
&One of the challenges that React Native developers face, or have reported in the past — one challenge is that native React Native code is
written in JavaScript, which means that it run using the browser JavaScript engine, which immediately kind of move this a little bit away
from the native model of the platform
The bit that they are very native in is that they use the operating system own controls
And while on the surface, that seems like a good thing in practice, that had quite a few challenges for developers around
compatibility.&
Google, obviously believes that its ability to compile to native code — and the speed gains that come with that — set
its platform apart from the competition
In part, it does this by using a hardware-accelerated 2D engine and, of course, by compiling the Dart code to native ARM code for iOS and
The company also stresses that developers get full control over every pixel on the screen.
With today launch, Google is also announcing new
third-party integrations to Flutter
The first is with Square, which announced two new Flutter SDKs for building payments flows, both for in-app experience and in-person
terminals using a Square reader
Others are2Dimensions, for building vector animations and embedding them right into Flutter, as well asNevercode, which announced a tool for
automating the build and packaging process for Flutter apps.
As for new Flutter features, Google today announced &Add to App,& a new feature
that makes it easier for developers to slowly add Flutter code to existing apps
In its early days, Flutter focus was squarely on building new apps from scratch, but as it has grown in popularity, developers now want to
use it for parts of their existing applications as they modernize them.
The other new feature is &Platform Views,& which is essentially the
opposite of &Add to App& in that it allows developers to embed Android and iOS controls in their Flutter apps.
