Google Releases Flutter 2.8

Google announced the availability of Flutter 2.8, the latest version of its open-source app development toolkit, which adds the first stable release of its Flame 2D game engine and other improvements.

“Hello and welcome to Flutter 2.8,” Chris Sells writes in the announcement post. “This release represents the hard work of 207 contributors and 178 reviewers, producing 2,424 PRs merged and 2976 issues closed. All of this collective work produced significant performance improvements in both the engine and in Flutter DevTools, a stable release of the Google Mobile Ads SDK for Flutter, a slew of new Firebase features and improvements, WebView 3.0, a new batch of Flutter Favorite packages, a raft of updates to desktop on our way to a stable release, and a new version of DartPad with support for more packages, including Firebase itself.”

Windows Intelligence In Your Inbox

Sign up for our new free newsletter to get three time-saving tips each Friday — and get free copies of Paul Thurrott's Windows 11 and Windows 10 Field Guides (normally $9.99) as a special welcome gift!

"*" indicates required fields

This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

Some of the key additions and improvements include:

Web platform views improvements. Platform views are how Flutter lets developers host native UI components from the underlying platform in apps, and the web platform views now offer dramatic performance improvements. So you can now have multiple instances in web apps without degrading performance.

Flutter Ads. The Google Mobile SDK for Flutter went GA last month with support for five ad formats, AdMob and Ad Manager integration, and a beta version of a new mediation feature to help optimize ad performance.

Firebase improvements. Over two-thirds of Flutter apps use Firebase, and Flutter 2.8 moves all FlutterFire plugins from beta to stable, with new support in DartPad for several Firebase services, new libraries for authentication and live Firestore query UI, and new Firestore Object/Document Mapping for Flutter in alpha.

Desktop app improvements. Flutter’s support for desktop app development isn’t quite stable yet, but it takes a step forward in 2.8 with improved internationalization and localization support, Windows accessibility integration, improved support for visual density, and more.

“As we close out 2021 and look forward to 2022, the Flutter team would like to express our gratitude for the work and support of the entire Flutter community,” Mr. Sells concludes. “The Flutter community is like no other and we’re grateful for all that you do. Have a happy holiday season and we’ll see you in the new year!”

Tagged with

Share post

Please check our Community Guidelines before commenting

Conversation 7 comments

  • bschnatt

    09 December, 2021 - 11:47 am

    <p>I’m excited to see the desktop app support improving. I’m keen on trying Flutter to do cross-platform development. Cheaper than Delphi!</p>

  • eric_rasmussen

    Premium Member
    09 December, 2021 - 12:40 pm

    <p>Flutter is great, it’s exactly what I was hoping Microsoft would eventually do with WPF or Silverlight or Xamarin.Forms. I prefer C# over Dart, but unfortunately Microsoft never really wanted to take on mobile app development seriously. At this point, Maui is pretty far behind the capabilities of Flutter so they’ve got a ton of catching up to do.</p>

    • rmac

      10 December, 2021 - 2:20 am

      <p>I think most MS devs are thinking along the same lines i.e. the preference is C# over Dart but we’re missing the portable UI stack which Flutter brings and time is marching on. You’d think a lightweighted XAML (just the bits that render UI) or indeed the C# equivalent could take on Skia which Flutter relies upon but it doesn’t seem to be a development in the pipeline.</p>

  • sofan

    09 December, 2021 - 1:25 pm

    <p> flutter killed xaramin RIP ⚰️</p>

    • martinusv2

      Premium Member
      09 December, 2021 - 3:10 pm

      <p>Yeah, Flutter is advancing way faster than MAUI. We can only hope. But will start to look into Flutter more.</p>

      • Jogy

        Premium Member
        09 December, 2021 - 7:21 pm

        <p>Yeah, MAUI was supposed to be released already with .NET 6.0 and VS 2022, but is delayed to sometime in 2022.</p><p><br></p><p>And, the whole move away from Xamarin.Forms to MAUI that is very similar but not exactly the same.</p><p><br></p><p>Reminds me of all the framework changes for the development from Windows Phone 7 to Windows Phone 8 to Windows Phone 8.1 to finally UWP for Windows 10 and Windows Mobile 10 – and then killing off the phones, which doomed UWP to be a meaningless framework.</p><p><br></p>

  • danroth27

    16 December, 2021 - 7:03 pm

    <p>"<span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Over two-thirds of Flutter apps use Firebase"</span></p><p><br></p><p>Paul, can you share where you got this Firebase usage stat from? Thanks!</p>

Windows Intelligence In Your Inbox

Sign up for our new free newsletter to get three time-saving tips each Friday

"*" indicates required fields

This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

Thurrott © 2024 Thurrott LLC