Last week the Google Flutter Team announced the release of Flutter 1.22! While not a major version update, it seems like a huge upgrade to the Flutter ecosystem.
It’s amazing how much has changed since their last update two months ago. Of course, we’ve been anticipating some of these changes for months, such as Navigator 2.0 and how the Flutter team would improve localization, so it’s exciting to see these come to fruition!
Below are some of the updates our team is most looking forward to exploring and using in production:
- Null Safety Draws Closer: We were delighted to see some internal updates to null safety which is the first step before non-nullable by default becomes universal. If you haven’t experimented with null safety yet, now is the time!
- App Appearance Upgrades: Flutter 1.22 also comes with a whole new “universe” of buttons, new replacement button widgets, and themes that synchronize with the latest material design specifications to help customize apps even further. You can still mix old buttons with new though, as they are all backwards compatible. Scrolling performance has also been drastically improved. With Flutter 1.22, apps look more beautiful than ever!
- Google Maps & WebViews: In v1.22, Google Maps and the Flutter WebView plugins are officially production ready! For developers already using these, you can rest assured that no additional major breaking changes will occur and that the underlying platform view implementation is production ready.
- iOS AppClips Support: We were also very excited to see that iOS 14 AppClips support is already available! After only a few days, the Flutter team has already delivered a solution to make Flutter compatible with the cool new iOS capability.
- Increasingly Helpful DevTools: Improvements to DevTools are also proving extremely useful. This includes an app size analyzer, updates to the networking DevTools, and improvements to the widget inspector. Debugging layouts in your Flutter app is now easier than ever.
- Dart 2.10 Arrives Too! Last week Dart 2.10 also arrived, bringing us new command line tools that consolidate utilities, such as formatting and analyzing, under a single command line tool to align with the Flutter CLI. Now things are more consistent and you can quickly discover the supported capabilities with a single command. If you’re used to using the Flutter CLI this will be a natural upgrade for you.
Overall, the upgrade from Flutter 1.20 to 1.22 should be relatively smooth, but make sure to clean your project and check your dependencies. There might be occasional deprecation warnings so make sure you understand all the changes in your code. As always, we’re looking forward to any future releases from the Flutter team!
You can read the full Flutter 1.22 announcement here and the Dart 2.10 announcement here.
Dominik Roszkowski and Felix Angelov contributed to this article.
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