Google’s Flutter Comes Out of Beta

Google announced today that its Flutter cross-platform mobile development framework has exited beta and is being stabilized ahead of its final release. The company released the first release preview of the app this week. The first release preview of the framework not only includes stability improvements, but it also boasts new features and tools for developers.

The company is releasing a new Flutter extension for Visual Studio Code with a new outline view, statement completion, and the ability to launch emulators right from the IDE. Along with the new release preview, Google noted some of the major improvements to the framework since the beta release. The company says it has continued to improve the video player package, support for Firebase Dynamic Links, support for 32-bit iOS devices with ARMv7 chips, and more. The company also noted some of the contributions from the open-source community, like the Flutter Studio web app where developers can build interfaces for Flutter.

Flutter is a promising new framework that aims to let developers build cross-platform apps without requiring to build platform-specific applications. While Flutter apps are not meant to replace PWAs, they do go head to head with apps build on frameworks like React Native and Microsoft’s Xamarin.