Google Releases Flutter 1.20

Google today announced the release of Flutter 1.20, the next major release of its cross-platform app development framework.

“Our ongoing vision with Flutter is to provide a portable toolkit for building stunning experiences wherever you might want to paint pixels on the screen,” Google’s Chris Sells writes in the announcement post. “With every release, we continue to push towards ensuring that Flutter is fast, beautiful, productive and open for every platform we support. In Flutter 1.20, which is released today to our stable channel, Flutter has improvements for every one of these four pillars.”

Those pillars are:

Fast. Flutter 1.20 brings multiple performance improvements, Sells says, from the lowest levels of the rendering engine to the Dart language itself.

Beautiful. Flutter 1.20 also brings several UI enhancements, including long-awaited support for autofill, a new way to layer widgets to support pan and zoom, new mouse cursor support, updates to classic Material widgets like the time and date pickers, and a new responsive license page for the About box in desktop and mobile form-factor Flutter apps.

Productive. The Flutter extension for Visual Studio Code that brings Dart DevTools directly into the IDE has gotten a significant update. Now, it automatically updates import statements as you move files around, and it provides a new set of metadata for building your own tools.

Open. Because of Flutter’s openness, this release includes 3,029 merged pull requests and 5,485 closed issues from 359 contributors from around the world, including 270 contributors from the Flutter community, Sells says. “In fact, this marks the largest number of contributors we’ve ever had for a Flutter release.”

Three months ago, Google reported that there were over 50,000 Flutter apps in the Google Play Store, but that number stands at 90,000 today.

You can learn a lot more about all the updates in the original Flutter post.