Flutter 3.16, the latest release of Google’s cross-platform UI toolkit, brings a wave of exciting features and enhancements, empowering developers to create more performant, visually appealing, and accessible apps. Let’s delve into the key highlights of this groundbreaking update:
Material 3, Google’s latest design system, takes center stage in Flutter 3.16, becoming the default visual style for Flutter apps. This marks a significant shift towards a more modern and expressive design language, offering a refreshing aesthetic and enhanced user experience.
The introduction of Impeller, a new rendering engine for Android, marks a pivotal moment in Flutter’s performance journey. Impeller, designed with a Vulkan backend, significantly improves Flutter app performance on Vulkan-capable devices, delivering smoother animations, faster frame rates, and reduced rendering latency.
Flutter 3.16 places a strong emphasis on accessibility, ensuring that apps are inclusive and usable by everyone. The new Text Scaler class empowers developers to scale text sizes consistently across different screen sizes and device configurations, catering to users with varying visual needs.
Flutter 3.16 introduces support for Predictive Back Navigation for Android 14, enhancing the user experience by anticipating the user’s intent when navigating back through the app. This feature seamlessly integrates with Flutter’s navigation system, providing a more intuitive and consistent user experience.
Improvements to Material 3 motion include the addition of Easing and Durations classes. Material 2 curves have been renamed to include the word “legacy” and will eventually be deprecated and removed.
On native iOS, users can now select text and initiate a share menu that provides several standard services. In this release, we’ve added the look up, search, and share options.
Flutter’s SelectionArea is updated to support native gestures associated with a single or double click using a mouse, and long pressing on a touch device. These new gestures are available by default with SelectionArea and SelectableRegion.
A new MatrixTransition widget allows transforms when creating animated transitions. Based on the current animation value, you can provide a matrix transformation that is applied to the child widget to create effects like the one in the following GIF.
Flutter 3.16 brings further enhancements to the scrolling capabilities introduced in previous versions. The 2D scrolling foundation now supports KeepAlive widgets, providing developers with more flexibility in managing widget lifecycles within scrollable areas. These updates improve the performance and usability of scrollable interfaces in Flutter apps.
Flutter Games Toolkit
Over the past few years, we’ve seen a growing community around casual game development. Tens of thousands of games have been published using Flutter, from simple but fun puzzles to more complex arcade games.
Flutter timeline events on Chrome DevTools
Flutter Timeline events are now exposed in the performance panel of Chrome DevTools.
Mouse scroll wheel support
While optimizing Wonderous to meet Android’s large screen guidelines, one issue we discovered was that the mouse scroll wheel didn’t work well on tablets or foldables. It was well known that the user had to move the scroll wheel a significant amount for the screen to respond.
App extensions
Flutter can now be used to target some iOS app extensions. This means that you can draw the UI for certain types of iOS app extensions using Flutter widgets. This doesn’t work for all types of app extensions because there might be limitations to the API (for example, home screen widgets) or memory.
macOS Video Player
We have added macOS support to the video player plugin, allowing developers to play videos on a widget surface.
DevTools extensions
The new DevTools extensions framework enables:
Flutter 3.16 also brings a range of additional enhancements, including:
Flutter 3.16 marks a significant step forward in the evolution of Flutter, delivering a compelling combination of performance improvements, design enhancements, and accessibility advancements. With Material 3 at the forefront, Impeller poised to revolutionize Android performance, and a renewed focus on accessibility, Flutter 3.16 empowers developers to create exceptional cross-platform apps that are both visually stunning and accessible to all.
Flutter redefines app development, offering robust features for mobile and web applications. At Cogtix Solutions, our expert team harnesses Flutter’s power to create stunning, cross-platform experiences. With a decade of experience and 10+ skilled developers, we’ve crafted 50+ successful apps. Partner with us to leverage Flutter’s potential for your next innovative project. Explore Cogtix Solutions‘ Flutter services today for cutting-edge, standout applications.