We all know that Google is conducting their event Google I/O 2021 from Tuesday, 18 May to Thursday, 21 May. There are a lot of innovations and updates for the previous versions where are discussed in this event. The coding highlight of the event is the announcement of the Flutter 2.2. It starts with a line Flutter is now the most popular framework for building cross-platform development. And all the newly added features justify the line.
There are a total of seven major things discussed. And see each one of them
Flutter 2.2
Incrementing the version number from 2.0 to 2.2. We all know that 2.0 is just announced 2 months back and here the next latest update. This update mainly focussed on enhancing the quality and productivity of flutter.
Null safety by default
Yes, you heard this right. Now, flutter supports Null safety by default. It shortens the cycle of finding errors. Before null safety, the cycle has four phases Validating changes, edit code, compile the change, navigate state. But now there is no need for navigating the state.
Desktop improvements
This update adds stability to desktop apps. Now, we can easily run our apps on desktop during development and improving tools, widgets. It also supports writing platform adaptive apps.
Dev tools
Added new custom memory timeline events. Easier to understand how memory is allocated. Enabled support for third-party tool extensions. Importing the dart developer package gives access to a lot of cool debugging, profiling, and tracing tools.
Web: Background caching using service workers.
Android: Supports deferred components. Which reduces apk size.
iOS: Tooling to precompile shaders to eliminate the first-jank issue.
Payments and Monetization
Google mobile ads SDK for flutter like incorporating null safety and adding adaptive banners. Launched new payments plugin which supports both google pay and apple pay. The biggest upgrade is, moved the in-app purchase plugin from beta to productive.
Flutter in Production
Who actually uses Flutter? Over 30 teams within Google have chosen to build with flutter. For example, the GooglePay team cut their code millions of lines and saving half of their time just by converting code to flutter. Other than Google there are some tech giants like Toyota, Canonical, Sony, Samsung, Microsoft surface also using Flutter. They also updated adobe XD to flutter plugin. And also they are providing alpha flutter support for Universal Windows Platform(UWP) apps.
Flutter + Google
We can also use other Google APIs and services within flutter and dart apps. For example, Dart on Google Cloud run. It takes zero to containerized dart server in just 10 lines. Because of this, we can run the backend very effectively(less amount of binary). For the front end, they have teamed up with firebase to create special i/o an open-source flutter web app powered by firebase services. Check this out here.
That's the end. These are the main topics that are discussed in the Google I/O 2021.
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