Everything about Flutter 2.0

On Wednesday, 3rd March 2021, the Flutter Engage Day we have the arrival of flutter 2.0. In this blog, I am going to discuss the key features of this update. Firstly, flutter has closed nearly 5807 issues, 4091 PRs merged, and a total of 298 contributors worked on it.

Web

Finally, the flutter web support moved from beta to stable. It is believed that flutter web is not perfect for every scenario like having a portfolio website that needs a good SEO. But we can expect this is the next update. When we are building a web app we come across a major problem of having no hashtag in the URL which is also got fixed in this latest update. The flutter team had shown a demo on how the web apps work by showing two websites. One is https://www.irobot.com/Root where children can learn coding by robots and the next one is https://flutterplasma.dev/ this is the demo video where all flutter objects are used to build.

Sound Null Saftey

By this, we can distinguish nullable types from non-nullable types. The compiler tells us when the code is vulnerable. Dart is only the second language other than the swift to have this feature.

Desktop

Windows, Linux, and Mac also came to the stable channel as an early release flag which means they get the stable update later this year.

Google mobile ads to beta

This is a plugin supported by flutter themselves that helps to add ads to your project. So that you can control the ads and generate more income.

New iOS features

New widgets are added like the Cupertino search text field widget, autocomplete core and scaffold messenger widget. We can directly build them from the command line without opening the hex code.

Add to app

If you have a native app built-in iOS or android we can able to add flutter to it. There is a problem here if you want to add flutter at multiple places in the code then you may suffer with the performance.

Flutter fix

Updates any code automatically for you. Which saves a huge amount of time.

Flutter devtools

Inspect widget option if you have any exception and click on this option then it shows where the problem is which makes debugging a lot easier. Widget sizes in the app are the main problem while building to overcome this Enable invert oversized images is used where we can debug size-related problems. We can also directly jump into the dev tools to inspect the elements. We can eliminate the waiting for dev tools to start, load errors to fix them.

Ecosystem updates

All the app plugins are updated to null safety.

These are the main key features of flutter 2.0. Other than these there are a lot of interesting news :

1. Google pay, google stadia, google one, etc. From now on all these runs with flutter.
2. Ubuntu announced that flutter is the default choice for future ubuntu apps.
3. Toyota said that they are going to use flutter embedded systems in their software to build apps for their automobiles.
4. Microsoft made a partnership with flutter to build perfectly working apps for their foldable devices.