Android Tag

What’s new in Flutter 2.8

Flutter aims to change how apps are built. It unites mobile, web, desktop, and embedded development into a single toolkit: letting developers focus first on what they want to build, rather than which platforms they want to target; offering a high-performance, high-productivity framework that shortens the inner loop for developers; and enabling one codebase to target multiple platforms and form factors.

New features and improvements: faster and more productive

One of the major areas of focus for this release is mobile performance. Ideally great performance would come for free, but in practice any complex app needs optimization to make sure it uses the underlying hardware and libraries well. That includes startup performance, which can be constrained by network bandwidth or other initialization costs; memory usage, particularly on memory-constrained devices; and graphics rendering. We’ve been using some of our experiences with large Google apps like Google Pay to invest both in making Flutter itself more performant, and in giving you better tooling to guide profiling and optimization of your own app. Your apps should start faster and use less memory just by upgrading to Flutter 2.8.

The latest update makes it easier than ever to connect apps to back-end services, such as Firebase and Google Cloud. It adds production-quality support for Google Ads and major upgrades to the camera and embedded web plugins. The release also includes Dart 2.15, which adds major improvements to concurrency, new language features like constructor tearoffs and enhanced enumerations, and optimizations that deliver a 10% reduction in memory utilization.

With the new developer productivity enhancements to Flutter, an app can support sign-in to multiple authentication services with just a single drop-in widget.
Pic courtesy: medium.com

Another big theme of investment in this release that you’ll see us carry forward into future releases is further improving developer productivity. With features like stateful hot reload, we’ve always focused on creating a tight inner loop for developers. We’re now starting to explore some higher-level abstractions that make it easier for developers to get running faster. For example, in this release we’re adding a sign-in widget that uses Firebase to handle authentication. With this widget, you don’t have to worry about all the edge cases of sign-in, such as two-factor authentication or reset password user flows, nor about the complexities of supporting Google, Apple, Twitter, or Facebook as an auth provider. Features like this, building on the core foundations of Flutter, have the potential to transform how developers build apps, combining the development speed of low-code solutions with the flexibility and power of a full UI framework.

Both Flutter 2.8 and Dart 2.15 are available now, and should be an easy upgrade for existing apps running the previous version. For greater detail, we have a technical blog post covering the enhancements in each of Dart and Flutter.

Casual game development with Flame

For most developers, Flutter is an app framework. But there’s also a growing ecosystem around casual game development, taking advantage of the hardware-accelerated graphics support provided by Flutter.

Today, we are thrilled to celebrate the 1.0 release of Flame, a modular 2D game engine built on top of Flutter. Flame provides what you need to build games quickly: as well as a game loop, it also includes core primitives such as a component system, animated sprites and images, collision detection, a world camera, an effects system, and gesture and input support.

Flame is modular and can also be extended with packages that offer integrations to other libraries, for instance Rive (for animations), audioplayers (for music and sound effects), Forge2D (a Box2D-style physics engine), Tiled (tile maps editor), Fire Atlas (a sprite sheet and animation editor). Together, Flame and the broader ecosystem offer a strong set of services for a casual or 2D game developer.

Tomb Toad, Gravity Runner and Bonfire: three examples of games built with Flame.
Pic courtesy: medium.com

Flame is created by Blue Fire, a group of contributors focusing on creating open source packages and plugins for Flutter and Dart. We’re delighted to partner with them and encourage you to check out Flame if you’re interested in game development.

Flutter’s continued momentum

We’re amazed to see how fast Flutter continues to grow, with a flourishing ecosystem of apps and tools that build on top of the core framework. At this year’s Google I/O event, we noted that there were already over 200,000 apps built with Flutter in the Play Store. In just over six months since that event, the number of Flutter apps has nearly doubled, with more than 375,000 Flutter apps now in the Play Store.

Flutter supports Android, iOS, iPadOS, web, Windows, macOS and Linux: so you don’t have to rewrite your app just to target a different device or form factor.
Pic courtesy: medium.com

Flutter isn’t just used on Android, of course. According to independent mobile analyst firm AppAnnie, apps using Flutter on iOS include top brands and apps including BMW, eBay, WeChat, SHEIN, Philips Hue, Norton, trip.com and Greggs. On the web, Flutter is finding a home for app experiences, benefitting design tools like FlutterFlow and Rive. On desktop, the Ubuntu engineering team continues to build a variety of new experiences with Flutter, including a new installer and firmware updater. Even games like PUBG are finding that Flutter is a great fit for UI screens.

Ecosystems take a long time to build, but Flutter is now the most popular multi-platform toolkit, as measured independently by Statista, JetBrains, SlashData, and Stack Overflow. We don’t take that for granted, but the growth of Flutter’s popularity leads to an ever broader ecosystem of packages and tools that support it.

For more information and to develop mobile apps using Flutter, Hire Flutter Developer from us as we give you a high-quality product by utilizing all the latest tools and advanced technology. E-mail us any clock at – hello@hkinfosoft.com or Skype us: “hkinfosoft”.

To develop Mobile Apps using Flutter, please visit our technology page.

Content Source:

1. medium.com

How to improve the performance of your React Native App

React-Native(RN) apps suffer huge performance issues as compared to native apps. During initial development days, such challenges are ignored but as soon as the app grows developers find it difficult to improve. Sometimes, extreme calls to dump the RN app happen. We can escape such steps and you can easily improve the RN app performance, just with little effort.

There are multiple ways to improve RN app performance:

Basics of RN performance:

Hermes: A JS engine to optimizes app start time, reduce APK size, and memory footprints. Follow this guide to setup for your app.

Remove Arrow functions: Every render creates new instances of these functions. When passed to children, it will re-render the child components even when nothing has changed in them.

Simple Reducers: Reducers are just to dispatch store changes, not for complex code logic, avoid that as much as possible.

Use native driver: Enable useNativeDriver=true for all the animations that you use in the app.

Memoization:

React.PureComponent: This works for class components. It does a shallow comparison for the previous and new props, re-renders if they are not equal.

React.memo: Only functional components can leverage this functionality, and works similar to React.PureComponent. React.memo comes with an option to use a custom comparison function, to provide more control over it. For the child functional components use React.memo export const ChildrenMemoComponent = React.memo(ChildFunctionComponent) to memoize.

Whenever parent component props change children’s components are also re-rendered causing huge performance issues. This can be avoided either by using shouldComponentUpdate(), React.PureComponent, React.Memo. Memoization breaks if React creates new functions instances when child component is passed with callback functions from parents. New function instances are created with inline function calls, arrow functions, functions calls inside render. For function component use useCallback hook and for class component define functions outside render and pass references to children.

Memory leaks:

Debugger warnings and errors: You need to get rid of them, just enable debugging, remove (console.disableYellowBox = true) and fix all the warnings, promise rejections, key errors and other errors too.

Android Studio Profiler: Great tool to find memory leaks in the app. In the below image, the bottom section has lots of bin icons(white color icons) that when android running its garbage collector and repeated icons indicate memory leaks. Perform actions in your app, debug them and fix asap.

Android Studio Profiler
Pic courtesy: medium.com

React-DevTools: React Profiler provides in-depth component-level leak detection, though it supports RN version ≥ 0.57. Profiler API helps in optimizations like memoization, cost of rendering, sluggish code, re-renders. Go through the docs to check how to integrate it with your app.

Inspecting using React-DevTools
Pic courtesy: medium.com

Inspecting RN bridge: RN Bridge works asynchronously and converts javascript queries as JSON, finally calling the natives modules. We are leaving for you to check out how to do this, there are numerous great articles on this, We will write more on this later.

Stay updated:

Keep your libraries, React version updated to the latest stable versions:

React-native upgrade helper: RN community provides awesome documentation for upgrading RN versions. Major updates are between v0.60.0 and v0.63.0, there will be more errors you will need to fix. Do check out what’s new with v0.64 here.

Upgrade libraries & dependencies: A time-consuming process, during RN update also keep React in mind and upgrade accordingly, v17.0.0 has major changes. For every dependency you upgrade follow the below process:

• Package.json: Segment out the major and minor version upgrades using npm website, “^”(^2.1.2 will use releases from 2.1.2 to <3.0.0) and “~”(~2.1.2 will use releases from 2.1.2 to <2.2.0). For minor version just replacing the version name will do the work. For Major version upgrades check out the version release documentation for breaking changes.
• Code changes: After upgrading the version inside package.json make suitable code changes using Github document and release notes.
• Remove junk: This is also the right time to clean your app code. Try to remove unused codes, folders, files, and dependencies from package.json. Also, to reduce your assets, there is a great tool that does lossless compression, ImageOptim.

That’s 90% of your whole performance improvement job. There are other ways like amalgamation of native code and RN code but we will leave that for some other time.

For more information and to develop mobile application using React Native, Hire React Developer from us as we give you a high-quality product by utilizing all the latest tools and advanced technology. E-mail us any clock at – hello@hkinfosoft.com or Skype us: “hkinfosoft”.

To develop a custom mobile application using React Native, please visit our technology page.

Content Source:

1. medium.com

Announcing XD to Flutter v2.0!

Flutter is Google’s open-source UI toolkit for building beautiful apps for mobile, desktop, web, and embedded devices from a single codebase. Over the last couple of years, it has become the leading choice for developers who want to build apps for multiple platforms; but designers need a visual tool for prototyping and creating Flutter UI, rather than handcrafting Dart source code. Enter XD to Flutter!

It’s been almost a year since the first preview release of the plugin, and we’ve continued to refine and improve it with a handful of minor updates, a major v1.0 launch last summer, and now a v2.0 release to match with the launch of Flutter 2!

Wait, what is XD to Flutter?

The name probably gives it away, but the XD to Flutter plugin is a powerful, easy-to-use tool to export your stunning Adobe XD designs into clean, functional code for Flutter. You can copy code for specific visual elements from your design, export reusable widgets, or even entire views.

That means that, with the XD to Flutter plugin, you can get your designs running on virtually any device with the click of a button. It’s not going to code your whole app for you, but it’ll give you a head start.

XD to Flutter is built by gskinner in partnership with Adobe, and is published as a plugin for Adobe XD itself, so you can use it with any existing Adobe XD design you’re building.

Awesome! So what’s new?

The initial release of XD to Flutter had great support for outputting all the different visual elements in a design — vector graphics, images, rich text, background blurs, blend modes, shadows, and similar — but the result could be static and inflexible.

While it was handy for grabbing an icon or text style, we wanted it to do more! XD empowers designers to create dynamic UIs, with tools like responsive layout, scrollable areas, stacks, and grids; we want the plugin to support every one of those capabilities, and with v2.0 we’ve made a lot of progress.

Responsive Resize

XD to Flutter supports the responsive layout features of XD, which lets you “pin” elements within their enclosing parent and precisely control how they resize.

Responsive design in Adobe XD
Pic courtesy: medium.com

Responsive resize in Flutter
Pic courtesy: medium.com

This is achieved in Flutter by using a custom Pinned layout widget in the open-source adobe_xd package that developers can leverage directly in their projects.

Pinned widget code example
Pic courtesy: medium.com

Stacks & Scroll Groups

“Stacks” and Scroll Groups provide new ways to lay out content on-screen dynamically in Adobe XD. Stacks in XD let you arrange a bunch of different elements in a horizontal or vertical list, with varying spacing between them; they are more similar to a Flex widget in Flutter than their namesake Stack widget.

Scroll Groups predictably let you define an area to scroll a larger group of content vertically or horizontally, right inside your design.

XD to Flutter v2.0 supports both of these features, converting them into common Flutter widgets (Column, Row, and SingleChildScrollView). You can even put a stack into a scroll group to easily create a scrolling list of items.

Stacks & Scroll Groups in XD (left) and Flutter (right)
Pic courtesy: medium.com

Padding & Background Elements

Another new feature is background elements, which let you designate a visual element as the background for a group. This can be paired with padding to space the background’s edges from the content.

The Flutter export uses a Stack widget to layer the background element behind the content, which is placed into a Padding widget.

Padding & Background in XD (left) and Flutter (right)
Pic courtesy: medium.com

Flutter 2 & null safety

The layout features described above enable much more responsive UI, complimenting Flutter 2’s increased support for form factors like desktop and web.

Flutter 2 also introduces sound null safety — a language feature that helps developers catch nullability issues before they cause problems in apps. XD to Flutter v2.0 includes a new setting to “Export Null Safe Code”, ensuring that the generated code is future-ready.

“Export Null Safe Code” setting and output
Pic courtesy: medium.com

Sounds great! How do we get started?

Whether you’re using it to copy the code for a tricky gradient, or to export fully responsive, parameterized, interactive widgets, it’s simple to join the thousands of creative professionals that are already using the XD to Flutter plugin.

You can install it by selecting “Browse Plugins…” from Adobe XD’s “Plugin” menu and searching for “Flutter” (strangely, searching for “XD to Flutter” doesn’t work),

Pic courtesy: medium.com

Once you have it installed, open the XD to Flutter panel from the plugins panel, and tap the “Need help?” link to check out the plugin documentation.

Flutter 2 is an exciting step forward for the framework, with a focus on building beautiful apps that run virtually anywhere. At gskinner, we’re thrilled to be working with Adobe and Google to ensure that XD to Flutter continues to make the process of faithfully translating a delightful design to a working product even easier.

Stay tuned for more exciting updates to the plugin soon!

For more information and to develop mobile apps using Flutter, Hire Flutter Developer from us as we give you a high-quality product by utilizing all the latest tools and advanced technology. E-mail us any clock at – hello@hkinfosoft.com or Skype us: “hkinfosoft”. To develop Mobile Apps using Flutter, please visit our technology page.

Content Source:

1. medium.com

What’s new in Flutter 2

Web

As of today, Flutter’s web support has transitioned from beta to the stable channel. With this initial stable release, Flutter pushes reusability of code to another level with the support of the web platform. So now when you create a Flutter app in stable, web is just another device target for your app.

By leveraging the web platform’s many strengths, Flutter built a foundation for building rich interactive web applications. We primarily focused on performance and improvements to our rendering fidelity. In addition to our HTML renderer, we added a new CanvasKit-based renderer. We’ve also added web-specific features, such as a Link widget, to make sure your app running in the browser feels like a web app.

Find more details about this stable release in Flutter’s web support blog post.

Desktop

In this release, we’re pleased to announce that Flutter’s desktop support is available in the stable channel under an early release flag. What this means is that we’re ready for you to give it a try as a deployment target for your Flutter apps: you can think of it as a “beta snapshot” that previews the final stable release coming later this year.

To bring Flutter desktop to this degree of quality, there have been improvements both big and small, starting with working to ensure that text editing operates like the native experience on each of the supported platforms, including foundational features like text selection pivot points and being able to stop propagation of a keyboard event once it’s been handled. On the mouse input side, dragging with a high precision pointing device now starts immediately instead of waiting for the lag needed when handling touch input. Also, a built-in context menu has been added to the TextField and TextFormField widgets for Material and Cupertino design languages. Finally, grab handles have been added to the ReorderableListView widget.

The ReorderableListView now has grab handles for easy drag ’n’ drop with a mouse Pic courtesy: medium.com

The ReorderableListView now has grab handles for easy drag ‘n’ drop with a mouse
Pic courtesy: medium.comThe ReorderableListView was always good at moving items around with very little effort on your part as a developer, but it required the user to initiate a drag using a long-press. That made sense on a mobile device, but few desktop users would think to long-press on an item with their mouse to move it around, so this release includes a grab handle suitable for mouse or touch input. Another improvement for platform-idiomatic functionality is an updated scrollbar that shows up correctly for the desktop form-factor.

This release includes an updated Scrollbar widget that works great in a desktop environment Pic courtesy: medium.com

This release includes an updated Scrollbar widget that works great in a desktop environment
Pic courtesy: medium.comThe Scrollbar widget has been updated to provide the interactive features that are expected on the desktop, including the ability to drag the thumb, click on the track to page up and down, and to show a track when the mouse hovers over any part of the scrollbar. Furthermore, since the Scrollbar is themeable using the new ScrollbarTheme class, you can style it to match your app’s look and feel.

For additional desktop-specific functionality, this release also enables command-line argument handling for Flutter apps so that simple things like a double-click on a data file in the Windows File Explorer can be used to open the file in your app. We’ve also worked hard to make resizing much smoother for both Windows and macOS, and to enable IME (Input Method Editors) for international users.

Flutter desktop now supports intuitive IME input
Pic courtesy: medium.com

In addition, we have provided updated docs on what you need to do to begin preparing your desktop app for deployment to the appropriate OS-specific stores. Give them a try and please provide feedback if we’ve missed anything.

When it comes to trying the beta for Flutter desktop, you can access it by switching to the beta channel as expected as well as setting the config flags for the platforms you’re targeting according to the directions on flutter.dev. In addition, we’ve also made a snapshot of the beta bits available on the stable channel. If you use ‘flutter config’ to enable one of the desktop config settings (for example, enable-macos-desktop), then you can try out the beta functionality of the desktop support w/o having to go through the lengthy process of moving to the beta channel and pulling down all the latest beta of the Flutter SDK, building the tools, etc. This is great for giving it a try or using the desktop support as a simple “Flutter Emulator.”

However, if you choose to stay on the stable channel to access the desktop beta, you won’t get new features or bug fixes as quickly as switching to the beta or dev channels. So, if you’re actively targeting Windows, macOS, or Linux, we recommend switching to a channel that provides updates more quickly.

As we approach our first full production-quality release of Flutter desktop, we know we have more to do, including support for integration with native top-level menus, text editing that feels more like the experience of the individual platforms, and accessibility support, as well as general bug fixes and performance enhancements. If there are other things you think need doing before the desktop moves to production quality, please be sure to provide your feedback.

Google Mobile Ads to Beta

In addition to Flutter desktop moving to beta, today we’re excited to announce an open beta for Google Mobile Ads SDK for Flutter. This is a brand new plugin that provides inline banner and native ads, in addition to the existing overlay formats (overlay banner, interstitial, and rewarded video ads). This plugin unifies support for Ad Manager and Admob, so no matter what size publisher you are, this plugin can be tailored to your scenarios.

Pic courtesy: medium.com

We’ve been piloting this plugin with some of our early customers in a private beta program, and many of them have successfully launched their apps with these new formats. For example, Sua Musica (largest Latin American music platform for independent artists with more than 15k verified artists and 10M MAU) launched their new Flutter app with the Google Mobile Ads SDK for Flutter plugin. They saw an 350% increase on Impressions with a 43% increase on CTR and 13% increase on eCPM.

This plugin is available for you to use today. As part of Flutter Engage, Andrew Brogdon and Zoey Fan presented a session on “Monetizing apps with Flutter” (available on the Flutter Engage site), where they talk about monetization strategies for apps built with Flutter, and how you can load ads in your Flutter app. Moreover, we created a new Ads page on flutter.dev where you can find all helpful resources such as the plugin implementation guide, the inline banner and native ads codelab, and the overlay banner, interstitial and rewarded video ads codelab. Please be sure to check them out!

For more information and to develop mobile apps using Flutter, Hire Flutter Developer from us as we give you a high-quality product by utilizing all the latest tools and advanced technology. E-mail us any clock at – hello@hkinfosoft.com or Skype us: “hkinfosoft”. To develop Mobile Apps using Flutter, please visit our technology page.

Content Source:

1. medium.com

Pros and cons of React Native development in 2021

React Native, next to Flutter and PWA, was called a revolution in cross-platform app development and delivering great mobile experience.

Code repository that’s shareable between platforms? Reusable components? That definitely sounds tempting.

React Native has been praised for its “Learn once, write anything.” objective which means you get a native look and feel of your app for both iOS and Android, and you may also include platform-specific modules.

For a developer with an experience in JavaScript, and React itself, it is easy to take up React Native and start building on it right away.

Some time ago one of our React Native apps, Guild, went public. (Update: Guild has been recognized by Red Herring’s 2019 Top 100 European Startups.)

We’re extremely proud of how the app is turning out and we just can’t wait to write more of them. Our devs and some of our clients are fully aboard the React Native train and in this post, we will tell you exactly why is that: from a perspective of a business owner and a JavaScript developer. As well as some React Native advantages and limitations.

Is React Native the pick for your next app?

Build a product your users will love to use. Get a highly performant, native app for Android, iOS, and even the Web. Work with our developers and designers to squeeze the most out of your app idea and React Native.

Business Perspective on React Native

Unlike other cross-platform frameworks like Ionic, the Facebook team stresses they acknowledge the differences between different platforms and React Native reflects that. Therefore, you can still include modules specific for iOS and Android like status bars, navigation, or access to native elements like camera and contacts are built according to the platform.

Using libraries such as React Native for Web or ReactXP allows a developer to build a cross-platform app that runs on the Web too, so there’s no need to build separate apps at all. We used ReactXP in one of our projects and it really felt like we’re getting the Web version for free. That’s pretty amazing.

Note that using React Native DOES NOT mean you will not need any help from a native developer. If your app includes many different native features, some work on their side may be required.

Now, when it comes to a team building…

Your front-end web developer can actually become a mobile developer without a need of learning iOS’s Swift or Java/Kotlin for Android. With some knowledge about native UI elements, React, and some platform-specific patterns, React Native is easy to pick up. That is a game changer in terms of building a team as your app will require just one instead of two (or even three if you’re also to conquer the Web).

You can hire JS developers who will be able to deliver for all platforms. Therefore, it is much easier for them to exchange knowledge, conduct a code review, and understand the code. What a difference it makes in terms of time and cost! Not to mention that React Native is all about bringing agility of web development to cross-platform development, with native results.

About the performance…

Some may argue that nothing will surpass the performance of native apps. It may be even true, but products written with React Native are almost identical in how they perform. Sometimes even better. In his great article comparing Native iOS and RN, John Calderaio says:

"(According to) the data we collected through measuring both of the application's CPU, GPU, and Memory during the tasks in each of the four tabs, the apps are also almost identical in how they perform. (…) React Native, winning two out of three categories, comes in first place as the better performing platform."

Wrapping-up: Pros and Cons for Business

Pros:

• Time and cost efficiency
• Native look and feel of your apps
• Sharing the codebase for iOS, Android, and the Web (with ReactXP and React Native for Web)
• One team for multiple platforms
• Awesome performance

Cons:

• Need for an expertise from a native developer for some platform-specific modules
• It’s not fully cross-platform, single-codebase approach

If you’re looking for a framework that will let you build a great cross-platform mobile app, check out Flutter.

Pic courtesy: medium.com

Bloomberg is a great example of preformant app written with React Native. Image source belitsoft.com.

Developer’s Perspective on React Native

When you start working with React, typically you go with a bundler like Webpack and spend some time considering the right bundling modules for your app. React Native is different, and yet it works similarly to React. It comes with everything you need to just sit down and start writing your code.

Hot/Live reload (similar to Instant Run on Android) is a beloved, killer feature that allows a developer to see introduced changes right away without complete rebuilding of the app. You don’t have to constantly check the results of actions you take which greatly boosts productivity and saves time on compilation.

When it comes to scroll, animations, buttons, text inputs and others, React Native gives an efficient recipe that allows developers to conduct basic tasks easily. Component usage is heavily simplified in comparison to native development and it’s huge.

Adding native modules may not be a piece of cake though.

Whereas there are countless libraries to choose from for iOS and Android, React Native does not exactly shine here. The list of third-party libraries and components is quite long, but in many cases they leave a lot to be desired. When working on modules like device sensors or push notifications, there is a chance you may need some help from a native programmer.

Truth to be told, the Facebook team together with outside collaborators and thriving population of active users constantly work on React Native making it better every day with over 2500 commits from 500 contributors last year.

According to Sophie Alpert, Engineering Manager on React:

"We're working on a large-scale rearchitecture of React Native to make the framework more flexible and integrate better with native infrastructure in hybrid JavaScript/native apps."

Even if it may happen that you’ll need to hack some existing solution or write something from scratch, this will happen more and more rarely.

Wrapping-up: Pros and Cons for a Developer

Pros:

• You’re web AND mobile developer!
• Great productivity
• Easy setup
• Simplified usage of styling components
• Hot/live reloading feature

Cons:

• Need of hacking some existing solutions or creating new ones from scratch
• Documentation still needs an upgrade

For more information and to develop web application using React JS, Hire React Developer from us as we give you a high-quality product by utilizing all the latest tools and advanced technology. E-mail us any clock at – hello@hkinfosoft.com or Skype us: “hkinfosoft”. To develop custom web apps using React JS, please visit our technology page.

Content Source:

1. medium.com

Flutter Windows Alpha is just announced

Windows remains a popular choice for desktop and laptop devices, with Microsoft reporting over one billion active devices running Windows 10. Our own statistics show that over half of all Flutter developers use Windows, so it’s a natural target for Flutter. Native desktop support opens up a variety of exciting possibilities for Flutter, including improved developer tooling, reduced friction for new users, and of course apps that can reach any device a user might have from a single codebase.

Adding Windows to Flutter

As described in our architectural overview, Flutter is a cross-platform UI toolkit that is designed to allow code reuse across operating systems such as iOS and Android, while also allowing applications to interface directly with underlying platform services. The goal is to enable developers to deliver high-performance apps that feel natural on different platforms, embracing differences where they exist while sharing as much code as possible. At the core of Flutter is the engine, which supports the primitives necessary to support all Flutter applications. The engine is responsible for rasterizing composited scenes whenever a new frame needs to be painted. It provides the low-level implementation of Flutter’s core API, including graphics, text layout, file and network I/O, accessibility support, plugin architecture, and a Dart runtime and compile toolchain.

Each new platform we add to Flutter expands the core framework with new services to enable it to shine on that platform. We started on Android and iOS with Material Design as well as a touch-based, mobile-centric user interface that is designed to be pixel-perfect on both mobile platforms. Adding support for desktop form factors with web, Windows, macOS, and Linux brings a whole new set of services, including robust support for keyboards, mice, mouse wheels and controllers on the input side as well as widgets that adapt or even work best at the larger screen sizes that come with web and desktop apps.

Furthermore, each new platform doesn’t just influence the Flutter framework and engine, but a lot of other things as well:

• Toolchain updates: adding a new target to the CLI and IDE tools (in this case Windows)
• Shell: support for handling input from Windows via WM_* messages and output via ANGLE, which uses Skia to render at native speed to an underlying DirectX surface
• Runner: every project gets a shell application for the supported targets. For Windows, it’s a Win32/C++ program that loads your Flutter code and executes it at runtime. It’s a good place to add native code to your app if you need it.
• Plugins: A plugin is a mixture of Dart code and native code for each of the platforms that the plugin supports. That native code needs to be added for each plugin that is compiled into your Flutter app on Windows.

This alpha release offers a solid foundation that we’ll stabilize over the coming months. With support for Windows 7 and above, we hope this gives adventurous developers something to get started with.

Getting started with Flutter for Windows

Get started by installing the Flutter SDK according to the Windows install instructions. To target Windows desktop, you first need to install the tooling described in the desktop docs. By default, Flutter assumes that you’re building production software and isn’t configured to develop Windows apps. However, that’s easily fixed from the command line:

$ flutter channel dev
$ flutter upgrade
$ flutter config --enable-windows-desktop

The first command sets Flutter to use the experimental-quality “dev” channel (instead of the “stable” channel, which is the default). This allows you to use platform support that’s still in alpha, like Windows. The second command pulls down the latest bits on that channel. The third command enables Windows app development on your PC.

Once you’ve set it up, every time you create a new Flutter app, using the extension support for either Android Studio or Visual Studio Code, or from the command line, it creates a windows subfolder.

Pic courtesy: medium.com

If you’re curious, running the default app on Windows looks like the following:

Pic courtesy: medium.com

And finally, once you’ve created your app, building it creates a release-mode, native EXE file as well as the necessary supporting DLLs. At that point, if you want to experiment with running your new Windows app on any Windows 10 machine, even those that don’t have Flutter installed, you can follow the steps to zip up the necessary files and go.

Plugins for Windows

Even though we’ve just reached the alpha release, the Flutter community has already been working on plugins for Windows. Here are a few:

• url_launcher: launch URLs in the browser from your app
• path_provider: find the path to special directions on the user’s machine like Documents or temp
• shared_preferences: keep user preferences serialized on disk between sessions of your app
• biometric_storage: storage encrypted by biometrics
• flutter_audio_desktop: play audio from your desktop apps

The benefit of using these plugins is that most of them also support other Flutter platforms, which enables you to target your apps at Android, iOS, web, etc. as well as Windows. Furthermore, while about one-third of the available packages on pub.dev (the package manager for Dart and Flutter) are plugins with platform-specific code, most are not. For instance, many of the highest quality and most used packages are part of the Flutter Favorite program and most of them work on Windows. If you’d like to see the full list of packages that run on Windows, you can run this query on pub.dev.

Interop with Windows

If you’d like to build your own plugins for Windows, you can. Once you’re on the dev channel and you have Windows enabled for your machine, you can get started with the following command:

$ flutter create --template plugin --platforms windows hello_plugin

At that point, you’ll be able to add your Flutter code to the lib subfolder and your Windows code to the windows subfolder in your plugin project. You’ll communicate between the two stacks using Platform Channels, which is essentially message passing between your Dart and C++ code. For a well crafted example of this, see the url_launcher implementation.

However, Platform Channels are not your only option for interop with Windows. If you like, you can use the Dart FFI (Foreign Function Interface) to load libraries and call into C-style APIs, such as the Win32 API. Unlike url_launcher, which uses Platform Channels, the path_provider plugin was implemented using FFI, as you can see in the GitHub repo. Instead of going back and forth between Dart and C++, FFI allows you to write code to import the API that you want directly. For example, here’s the code for calling the MessageBox API:

typedef MessageBoxNative = Int32 Function(
  IntPtr hWnd, 
  Pointer<Utf16> lpText, 
  Pointer<Utf16> lpCaption,
  Int32 uType
);
typedef MessageBoxDart = int Function(
  int hWnd, 
  Pointer<Utf16> lpText, 
  Pointer<Utf16> lpCaption, 
  int uType
);
final user32 = DynamicLibrary.open('user32.dll');
final win32MessageBox =
  user32.lookupFunction<MessageBoxNative, MessageBoxDart>('MessageBoxW');
void showMessageBox(String message, String caption) =>
  win32MessageBox(
    0, // No owner window
    Utf16.toUtf16(message), // Message
    Utf16.toUtf16(caption), // Window title
    0 // OK button only
  );
...
// call just like any other Dart function
showMessageBox('Test Message', 'Window Caption');

This code doesn’t incur the overhead of transitioning between two threads like Platform Channels. FFI includes support for many different kinds of APIs, including Win32, WinRT, and COM. But before you run off and wrap the entire C-based Windows API, please check out the win32 plugin, which is already well on its way to doing just that. In fact, the path_provider plugin was itself implemented using the win32 plugin.

For more information and to develop mobile apps using Flutter, Hire Flutter Developer from us as we give you a high-quality product by utilizing all the latest tools and advanced technology. E-mail us any clock at – hello@hkinfosoft.com or Skype us: “hkinfosoft”. To develop Mobile Apps using Flutter, please visit our technology page.

Content Source:

1. medium.com

What’s new in Flutter 1.2

Ongoing vision with Flutter is to provide a portable toolkit for building stunning experiences wherever you might want to paint pixels on the screen. 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.

Autofill for mobile text fields

One of the #1 most requested Flutter features for a while has been to support the underlying Android and iOS support for text autofill in Flutter programs. With PR 52126, we’re pleased to say that the wait is over — no more asking your users to re-enter data that the OS has already gathered for them.

Autofill in action
Pic courtesy: medium.com

You’ll be pleased to hear that we’ve already started adding this functionality for the web, as well.

A new widget for common patterns of interaction

This release introduces a new widget, the InteractiveViewer. The InteractiveViewer is designed for building common kinds of interactivity into your app, like pan, zoom, and drag ‘n’ drop, even in the face of resizing, which this simple Go board sample demonstrates.

Zooming, panning, resizing, dragging and dropping with the InteractiveViewer
Pic courtesy: medium.com

To see how to integrate the InteractiveViewer into your own app, check out the API documentation where you can play with it in DartPad. Also, if you’d like to hear about how the InteractiveViewer was designed and developed, you can see a presentation by the author for Chicago Flutter on YouTube.

If you’re interested in adding the kind of interactivity to your Flutter app that InteractiveViewer enables, then you’ll probably also be happy to hear that we’ve added more capabilities to drag ‘n’ drop in this release. Specifically, if you’d like to know precisely where the drop happened on the target widget (it’s always been available to the Draggable object itself), now you can get that information with the DragTarget onAcceptDetails method.

Pic courtesy: medium.com

New drag target accept details in action

Check out this sample for the details and look forward to a future release that will make this information available during the drag as well so that the DragTarget can more easily provide visual updates during a drag operation.

Updated Material Slider, RangeSlider, TimePicker, and DatePicker

In addition to new widgets, this release includes a number of updated widgets to match the latest Material guidelines. These include Slider and RangeSlider. For more information, see What’s new with the Slider widget?

Pic courtesy: medium.com

updated Material Slider

Pic courtesy: medium.com

DatePicker has been updated to include a new compact design as well as support for date ranges.

Pic courtesy: medium.com

And finally, TimePicker has a completely new style.

Pic courtesy: medium.com

If you’d like to play around with it, here’s a fun web demo built with Flutter.

Responsive Licenses page

Another update this release is the new responsive licenses page available from the AboutDialog.

Pic courtesy: medium.com

PR 57588, from community contributor TonicArtos, is not only updated to match Material guidelines, making it just plain nice to look at, but it’s easier to navigate and designed to work as well on tablets and desktops as on phones. Thanks, TonicArtos! Since every Flutter app should be showing the licenses for the packages they’re using, you just made every Flutter app better!

New pubspec.yaml format required for publishing plugins

Of course, Flutter isn’t just the widgets; it’s also the tooling and this release comes with too many updates to mention. However, here are some of the highlights.

First and foremost, a public service announcement: if you’re a Flutter plugin author, then the legacy pubspec.yaml format is no longer supported for publishing plugins. If you try, you’ll get the following error message when executing pub publish:

Pic courtesy: medium.com

The old format did not support specifying which platforms your plugins support, and has been deprecated since Flutter 1.12. The new pubspec.yaml format is now required for publishing new or updated plugins.

For clients of plugins, the tools still understand the old pubspec format and will for the foreseeable future. All existing plugins on pub.dev using the legacy pubspec.yaml format will continue to work with Flutter apps for the foreseeable future.

Preview of embedded Dart DevTools in Visual Studio Code

The biggest tooling update in this release comes to the Visual Studio Code extension, which provides a preview of a new feature to enable you to bring Dart DevTools screens directly into your coding workspace.

Pic courtesy: medium.com

Preview of Layout Explorer from Dart DevTools embedded into Visual Studio Code

Enable this feature with the new dart.previewEmbeddedDevTools setting. The above screenshot shows the Flutter Widget Inspector embedded directly into Visual Studio Code but with this new setting enabled, you can choose your favorite page embed using the Dart DevTools menu on the status bar.

Pic courtesy: medium.com

This menu allows you to choose which pages to show.

Pic courtesy: medium.com

This feature is still in preview, so let us know if you have any trouble with it.

Updates to network tracking

The latest version of Dart DevTools comes with an updated version of the Network page that enables web socket profiling.

Pic courtesy: medium.com

Timing, status and content type of socket connections on the Network page of Dart DevTools

The Network page now adds timing information to the network calls from your app, along with other information like status and content type. Additional improvements have been made to the details UI to provide an overview of the data in a websocket or http request. We’ve also got more plans for this page to include HTTP request/response bodies and monitoring gRPC traffic.

Updating import statements on file rename

Another new feature for Visual Studio Code is updating imports on rename, which automatically updates import statements when files are moved or renamed.

Pic courtesy: medium.com

moving Dart files in Visual Studio Code updates the import statements

This feature currently only works for single files and not multiple files or folders, but that support is coming soon.

For more information and to develop mobile apps using Flutter, Hire Flutter Developer from us as we give you a high-quality product by utilizing all the latest tools and advanced technology. E-mail us any clock at – hello@hkinfosoft.com or Skype us: “hkinfosoft”. To develop Mobile Apps using Flutter, please visit our technology page.

Content Source:

1. medium.com

How to improve app startup using I/O prefetching

In Android 11, it’s introduced IORap, a new feature which greatly improves application startup times. We have observed that apps start more than 5% faster (cold startup) on average across a variety of devices. Some hero cases show 20%+ faster startup times. Users get this additional performance without any developer app changes!

IORap prefetching for Android apps

IORap reduces app startup times by predicting which I/O will be required and doing it ahead of time. Many app startups have a lot of time that the IO request queue isn’t being saturated because of blocking I/O. As a result, we aren’t maximizing IO latency. After prefetching the data and compacting the I/O, the app can access this data nearly instantly from the pagecache , significantly reducing app startup latency.

Pic courtesy: medium.com

When we evaluated some popular top apps from the Play Store, 80%+ spent 10%+ time in blocking I/O during launch time. while ~50% of the apps even spent 20%+ time. A majority of apps we looked at could benefit from IORap.

Pic courtesy: medium.com

Pic courtesy: medium.com

IORap works as an independent service on the device. It interacts with package manager, activity manager, perfetto service, etc via IPC. The overall architecture of IORap is shown in the following figure:

Pic courtesy: medium.com

Step 1: Collecting perfetto traces

IORap uses a profiling-based strategy to determine the I/O to be prefetched. The knowledge comes from perfetto trace, which records the kernel pagecache page removals/additions (from ftrace). In the first several cold-runs of an app, the perfetto tracing is on to get the pagecache missing events. Our study shows the overhead of perfetto tracing on startup time is neglectable.

Step 2: Generating prefetch list

Based on the perfetto traces obtained from the prior step, IORap generates a prefetch list during the idle time of the device. Basically, the prefetch list contains the information of the file (name, offset, length) that was accessed by an app when it’s launched. IORap analyzes the mm_pagemap events from the perfetto trace and converts its result (inode, offset, length) to (name, offset, length) by reversing inode to filename. Data is then stored in the prefetch list, which is a protobuf file.

Pic courtesy: medium.com

Step 3: I/O prefetching

After the prefetch list is generated, IORap can prefetch the corresponding data for the following runs of the app. The perfetto tracing is not needed any more. The user and developer don’t need to do anything. The prefetching is performed when the user taps on the icon or indirectly via another app requesting it via Intent. Enjoy the speedup!

Step 4: Obsoleting the prefetch list

The prefetch list doesn’t live forever. Several events may cause the prefetch list to become obsolete. When an app is updated, the prefetch list is deprecated because the app may change and the previous data may be inaccurate. Also, the dexopt service can optimize the app after installation. Once the app is optimized, the layout may differ making the prefetch list obsolete. The obsolete prefetch list will be removed and a new round will start with perfetto trace collections.

Improvements & Observation

Collating results from several experiments in our lab we determined that IORap benefits cover the spectrum from low end to high end devices. On average, IORap could provide up to ~26% speedup. It’s extremely helpful for apps that have heavy I/O during startup. For example, Spotify shows double digit improvement for both low-end devices (Go and Pixel 3A) and high end-devices (Pixel 3 or 4).

Pic courtesy: medium.com

One interesting observation during the experiment is that the performance of IORap is largely impacted by the amount of prefetched data. An accurate trace duration is super important for IORap. A shorter trace duration causes less data than necessary to be prefetched and less performance gain. On the other hand, a longer one leads to more data than necessary being prefetched, which may result in slower startup in worst case scenarios. IORap uses the timestamp of when an app reports the ReportFullyDrawn event to estimate trace duration. For apps not reporting this event, the display time is used. So invoking the reportFullyDrawn callback at the right time can improve the performance of IORap.

Future Development

We’re excited about the improvement that IORap has shown, and we plan to explore this concept more in the future in the following two directions. Firstly, prefetching more often. It would be great if prefetching could be done during profiling. Then we could eliminate some of the performance gap before generating the prefetching list by providing a prebuilt prefetching list. Secondly, IORap could predict that an app will start and begin prefetching earlier, further speeding up startup time.

For more information and to develop Android Mobile Apps, Hire Android Developer from us as we give you a high-quality product by utilizing all the latest tools and advanced technology. E-mail us any clock at – hello@hkinfosoft.com or Skype us: “hkinfosoft”. To develop Android Mobile Apps, please visit our technology page.

Content Source:

1. medium.com

Appflow: not just another CI/CD service

Every production mobile app ultimately has a set of recurring tasks around integration, testing, deployment, and long term maintenance. These tasks often must be automated across a team of many developers and app projects. Building a process for these tasks can be incredibly time consuming and require specialized infrastructure experience, but is critical for the success of any serious app project.

Thankfully, teams don’t need to build solutions to these problems themselves, as there are services out there that can help. One such service works directly with your Cordova or Capacitor app to help your team easily perform these tasks. That means consistent builds, deploys on every commit, pushing remote app updates in realtime, and automating app store deployment as part of your mobile CI/CD workflow.

That service is Appflow, and it’s Ionic’s official Mobile DevOps platform. Appflow automates the whole DevOps side of your mobile app project, and is used to power significant apps and development teams across AAA, Burger King/Popeyes, Shipt, and more.

Let’s explore what a Mobile DevOps platform like Appflow is, what Appflow offers, how it differs from traditional CI/CD platforms, and how it’s being used today.

What is Mobile DevOps?

Appflow is known as a Mobile DevOps platform.

Mobile DevOps platforms, of which Appflow is one of the leaders, automate and simplify many continuous integration and delivery tasks, as well as other important mobile app deployment tasks. These platforms handle the heavy lifting so teams can focus on building their unique app, instead of reinventing the wheel.

Those tasks may include:

• Setting up consistent, repeatable mobile build environments so apps can be built on every commit using predictable dev tools and operating systems.
• Building app binaries and artifacts for iOS, Android, and Web
• Running tests and other scripts on every commit to ensure apps stay working
• Connecting to existing GitHub, Gitlab, Bitbucket, and other repos to perform builds on every commit
• Releasing working updates to users in realtime (for web updates), or to the app stores (for binary updates)
• Managing different versions of apps between testers, stakeholders, and production users.
• Not every platform supports all of those features (Appflow does, as we’ll see below), but these are generally the tasks that a Capacitor or Cordova development team will need to perform.

Beyond these tasks, DevOps is all about creating a culture of shipping often, involving stakeholders, and ensuring quality. All of which Mobile DevOps products can help your team embrace.

What is Appflow?

Appflow is the official Mobile DevOps platform built by the Ionic team, focused on bringing powerful Mobile DevOps workflows to hybrid app developers across Capacitor and Cordova whether or not they are using Ionic Framework.

Appflow, first and foremost, is a managed mobile build environment. That means it provides consistent and frequently updated iOS, Android, and web build environments. The Appflow team does the hard work of keeping mobile build tools and operating systems up to date and patched for security issues, whether that means updating to the latest versions of Xcode or the Android SDK, or new versions of macOS and Linux, and a whole lot more.

These builds are done in a highly secure environment, so teams can feel confident in offloading their mobile CI/CD process to Appflow, and on high performance hardware to make builds match the speed of development.

Appflow also manages authentic, legal Mac build hardware for fully automating iOS builds in the cloud, which also benefits developers on Windows machines that wish to build iOS apps but can’t or don’t want to buy Mac hardware.

On top of this environment, Appflow provides some pretty transformative features for hybrid app developers. Namely, the ability to remotely update an app without needing to re-submit to app stores (in a way that is App Store ToS friendly!), as well as publish app binaries directly to the Apple App Store and Google Play Store.

And Appflow can automate that whole process so it triggers on each commit, as well as enable powerful version splitting so testers, stakeholders, and customers can run on different versions of an app.

Can’t we do this with Circle CI, GitHub Actions, or Azure DevOps?

In the CI/CD space, there are generic build services like Circle CI or GitHub Actions, and there are specialized services like Appflow.

The biggest difference between the services is that Circle CI or GitHub Actions merely provide build servers, a way to trigger builds, and hooks for sending those builds elsewhere. They do not provide the tools or pipeline for mobile-specific builds, they do not handle the deployment of your app, and they certainly don’t manage build environments for you.

Here’s a visualization of the differences between the two approaches:

Pic courtesy: ionicframework.com

In theory, teams could build their own Appflow-style pipeline on another generic CI/CD platform like Circle CI or GitHub Actions, but that would require teams orchestrate and keep up to date a very complex chain of tools, operating systems, build environments, app store submission features, remote app deployment, and more. This is guaranteed to take a full team of engineers with a different skillset than the app dev team to build and manage, especially as new mobile and desktop operating systems are released each year.

It’s simply not feasible for the vast majority of teams to take this on in addition to building their apps.

This is why a specialized build service like Appflow stands out in the CI/CD and DevOps space. Beyond simply being a build service, Appflow is a managed mobile build environment that is fully managed by the mobile experts here at Ionic.

Why not both?

Generic CI/CD tools, with their focus on simply triggering builds, are not a direct replacement for Appflow. That means the two can easily be used alongside each other.

In this scenario, a team might have their generic CI/CD tool trigger builds and push code to Appflow, while Appflow manages the hard work of performing mobile builds on managed mobile development infrastructure, while also handling the last mile app update and app store publishing.

This works so well that around 68% of Appflow customers are using Appflow alongside a general purpose CI/CD tool, according to data from the 2020 Ionic Developer Survey.

This delivers the best of both worlds: You get to continue using your CI/CD tool of choice – or whatever your company has standardized on – while leaving the highly specialized, mobile specific build and publishing requirements to Appflow.

For more information and to develop mobile apps using Ionic, Hire Ionic Developer from us as we give you a high-quality product by utilizing all the latest tools and advanced technology. E-mail us any clock at – hello@hkinfosoft.com or Skype us: “hkinfosoft”. To develop Mobile Apps using Ionic, please visit our technology page.

Content Source:

1. ionicframework.com

Capacitor 2.0 is just released!

Developers use Capacitor as a native app container for packaging and deploying their Ionic apps to various mobile and desktop platforms. The capacitor allows them to access native features like the Camera using the same code across all platforms – without having to worry about platform-specific details.

This new version updates Capacitor and its project templates to the latest security, bug fixes, and features including:

• Swift 5 and Xcode 11+ support
• Android 10 (SDK 29) and AndroidX support, which makes Face Unlock and Iris Unlock available now in Ionic Identity Vault.
• Bug fixes and usability improvements to 23+ core plugins

Why Capacitor?

Traditionally, web developers have turned to tools like Apache Cordova/Adobe PhoneGap to deploy their web apps to other platforms. This worked well for many years, with Ionic recommending Cordova as the default method for targeting native iOS and Android platforms. Over time our opinions changed about how this layer should work and after exploring various ideas, determined the best option was to bring the native runtime component of app building in-house.

Now a key part of the Ionic Platform, Capacitor makes it easy for web developers to reuse their skills to build quality apps for all platforms, while significantly lessening the likelihood that they’ll get stuck on native-specific issues. You can learn more about how Capacitor compares with Cordova in this article penned by Max.

Capacitor 2.0 updates its underlying technology to support the latest versions of programming languages and operating systems that power all Capacitor apps, enabling improved performance, security, and modern development experiences. Specifically, support for the latest tech from iOS and Android is now available.

Swift 5 and Xcode 11+

On the iOS front, this means Swift 5 and Xcode 11+ support. This brings smaller app bundle sizes, modern development tooling and features, and compatibility with earlier versions of Swift.

Android 10 (SDK 29) and AndroidX

On Android, this means Android 10 (aka SDK 29), with improved security and biometrics, audio/video capabilities, and system-wide dark mode.

Additionally, AndroidX, the next generation of the Android Support Library, is now supported. Both provide Android developers with a standard way to provide users with newer features on earlier versions of Android or graceful fallback when unavailable.

AndroidX replaces the Support Library, providing feature parity and backward-compatibility while also bringing improvements to library modularity, smaller code size, and a better developer experience.

Whether you’re a consumer of Capacitor or a plugin author, you simply need to update your projects (or CLI) to access these new capabilities (see below).

Improved Plugins, Tooling, and Docs

Capacitor 1.0 wouldn’t have been as successful as it has been without a solid developer experience backing it. With Capacitor 2.0, we’ve reviewed it from head to toe, leading to updates to the core plugins, the CLI tooling, and documentation.

Fundamentally, if you’re going to build unique app experiences, you need a reliable set of plugins to build on top of. Capacitor 2.0 includes many updates to its 23 core plugins, from bug fixes to new features to usability improvements. Many of these changes were driven by feedback from you, the Ionic community, so thank you! We appreciate your efforts and feedback – it helps us ensure that it’s never been easier to get started with Capacitor.

Speaking of awesome community efforts, Ionic’s official tool for generating splash screens and icons, cordova-res, just got a big update: Capacitor support! Thanks to wanna dream for this contribution.

npm i -g cordova-res
cordova-res --skip-config --copy

Capacitor’s embrace of native tooling means that it’s never been easier to implement more creative native features. That said, the nuances and details can be challenging, so we’ve begun to add new implementation guides to the Capacitor docs, including Deep Links, Sign In with Apple, and a refreshed Push Notifications with Firebase guide. There are more coming soon – if there’s content you think is missing, please let us know in the comments.

Android Face Unlock & Iris Unlock

In order to protect your user’s data, you need to keep up with the latest mobile security features. Security is traditionally challenging to implement correctly – with disastrous results if done wrong.

With the new support of AndroidX in Capacitor 2.0, Ionic Identity Vault now supports Android’s Face Unlock and Iris Unlock. This update to Ionic’s all-in-one frontend identity management system brings industry-leading facial and iris authentication features to the Android platform. Using a simple API, you can add top of the line biometric authentication to your Capacitor apps. Learn more here.

Backward compatibility with Cordova

Capacitor 2.0 maintains near 100% backward compatibility with Cordova (available since the project originally launched). Not only does this ensure a smooth migration from Cordova to Capacitor, but it also provides access to thousands of existing native plugins. Learn how to use Cordova plugins here.

Easy Update Process

Capacitor gives Ionic developers complete control of their native projects. Among many other benefits, this makes updating easy and straightforward.

First, update Capacitor Core and the CLI:

cd your-app-folder
npm install @capacitor/cli@latest
npm install @capacitor/core@latest

Next, update each Capacitor library in use:

npm install @capacitor/ios@latest
npx cap sync ios

npm install @capacitor/android@latest
# Within Android Studio, click "Sync Project with Gradle Files" button

cd electron
npm install @capacitor/electron@latest

Then, follow these update instructions which cover one-time manual steps:

• iOS
• Android
• Electron
• Breaking Changes

More than a version number

Capacitor 2.0 is a significant update to an increasingly important part of Ionic’s app development platform.

We’ve been blown away by the reception of Capacitor since it was announced, and installs have been growing quickly.

With 2.0, we are starting to make Capacitor the default for all new Ionic React and soon Ionic Angular projects, and expect us to be recommending Capacitor for all new Ionic apps and increasingly for enterprise apps as well.

Additionally, we are dedicating more internal resources to Capacitor as it becomes a key part of the Ionic offering. Expect to see Capacitor receive a lot more focus and attention from us in the coming months.

For more information and to develop mobile apps using Ionic, Hire Ionic Developer from us as we give you a high-quality product by utilizing all the latest tools and advanced technology. E-mail us any clock at – hello@hkinfosoft.com or Skype us: “hkinfosoft”. To develop Mobile Apps using Ionic, please visit our technology page.