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.”

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 Flutter