Google Bridges Android, iOS Development With Flutter 1.0

Google has launched Flutter 1.0, the first stable release of its open source, cross-platform UI toolkit and SDK. 'Flutter lets developers share a single code base across Android and iOS apps, with a focus on speed and maintaining a native feel,' reports Ars Technica. From the report: Flutter enables cross-platform app code by sidestepping the UI frameworks of both Android and iOS. Flutter apps run on the Flutter rendering engine and Flutter framework, which are shipped with every app. The Flutter platform handles communication with each OS and can spit out Android and iOS binaries with native-looking widgets and scrolling behavior if desired. It's kind of like applying a 'video game' style of development to apps: if you write for a game engine like Unity or Unreal, those engines are packaged with your game, allowing it to run on multiple different platforms. It's the same deal with Flutter.

Flutter apps are written in Dart, and the SDK offers programmers nice quality-of-life benefits like the 'stateful hot reload,' a way to instantly make code changes appear in the emulator. For IDEs, there are plugins for Visual Studio Code, Android Studio, and IntelliJ. Apps come with their own set of Flutter UI widgets for Android and iOS, with the iOS widgets closely following Apple's guidelines and the Android widgets following Google's Material Design. Flutter is designed to be fast, with its custom app engine running on Google's hardware-accelerated Skia engine. This means 60fps apps on Android and iOS and a path for 120fps apps in the future. This is a bigger deal on Android than it is on iOS. The Google Ads app is already built on Flutter, which means Google 'thinks Flutter is ready for prime time,' writes Ron Amadeo. There's a list of other apps built on Flutter, too. Amadeo goes on to suggest that Flutter may be the path to Android's replacement. 'Flutter ships its own app engine on Android and iOS, but in secret, Google is also developing an OS called 'Fuchsia' that runs these Flutter apps natively,' writes Amadeo. 'With Fuchsia, Google would switch from the Android apps written in Java to Flutter apps written in Dart...'

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