Kotlin and Flutter are two popular technologies for Android app development. While Kotlin is a native Android development language, Flutter is a hybrid app development framework based on Dart. Both have their own respective pros and cons, which you should analyze before starting the development procedure. In short, there is no clear answer to the Flutter vs. Kotlin question, and the choice depends on your specific needs and preferences.
Here are some key factors to consider when choosing between Kotlin and Flutter for Android app development in 2024:
Both Kotlin and Flutter are free and open-source technologies with active communities. Flutter has a larger dev community, active forums, and is constantly expanding. It is backed by Google and has a growing and vibrant community, with a wide range of packages and libraries available.
Kotlin, being a language primarily used for Android development, has a strong community and ecosystem specific to Android app development. It has also gained popularity, particularly in the Android development community, with many companies transitioning from Java to Kotlin for Android app development.
Kotlin is interoperable with Java, and its syntax is quite simple and easy, showing many similarities with the existing languages such as Java and Swift for Android and iOS, respectively. This makes it easier for developers to learn and use Kotlin.
Flutter, on the other hand, has its own UI rendering engine and offers a rich set of customizable widgets, providing more control over the app’s look and feel. This can make it more challenging for developers to learn and use Flutter.
Flutter provides a variety of widgets, which makes platform-specific designing quick and efficient. It has a unified user experience on all platforms as it is a widget-based cross-platform framework with terrific options to customize the app.
Kotlin, being a language, doesn’t have a direct impact on UI/UX development. Developers have to use other tools and technologies to design the app’s user interface.
Flutter allows for code sharing between different platforms, enabling developers to write once and deploy on multiple platforms. This can save time and effort in the development process.
Kotlin, being primarily used for Android development, doesn’t have the same level of code sharing capabilities.
Kotlin offers its users a plethora of advantages such as high-speed animation, the same language for both high and back-end needs, and a lot more. But when we compare it with Flutter, it surely lags.
Flutter is known for its hot reload functionality, thus, making it users to change easily and accordingly. Flutter goes over the edge by dint of its efficiency in the cross-platform frameworks’ efficiency race.
Flutter has various testing features and a unique widget testing feature. In comparison, Kotlin’s primary focus is to deliver backend development services and uses Firebase as a secure backend option.
In conclusion, both Kotlin and Flutter have their own strengths and weaknesses. Flutter is a better choice for cross-platform app development, provides a variety of widgets, and allows for code sharing between different platforms. Kotlin is a native Android development language, has a strong community and ecosystem specific to Android app development, and offers a simpler learning curve. The choice between the two depends on your specific needs and preferences.
For more information, please head over to our Hire Android Developer page and to develop a web application using Android, Hire Android Developer at HK Infosoft – we are destined to provide you with an innovative solution using the latest technology stacks. E-mail us any clock at – hello@hkinfosoft.com or Skype us: “hkinfosoft”.
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Look no further than FlutterFlow – an innovative visual development platform that’s taking app development to the next level with its intuitive Drag & Drop functionality. In this blog post, we’ll dive into what FlutterFlow is, its key features, and how you can use it to rapidly bring your app ideas to life.
At its core, FlutterFlow is a powerful visual development platform designed to simplify and accelerate the process of building mobile and web applications. It’s built on top of Google’s Flutter framework, which is renowned for its ability to create high-quality, natively compiled applications for mobile, web, and desktop from a single codebase.
FlutterFlow takes the power of Flutter and adds an intuitive drag-and-drop interface, making it accessible to developers of all skill levels. Whether you’re a seasoned developer or just starting out, you can leverage FlutterFlow to design, develop, and deploy apps without the need for extensive coding knowledge.
1. Visual Interface: FlutterFlow offers a visual interface that lets you design your app’s user interface by simply dragging and dropping elements onto the canvas. This speeds up the design process and ensures a pixel-perfect result.
2. Widgets Gallery: The platform provides a wide range of pre-built widgets that you can customize to match your app’s design. From buttons and text fields to complex interactive components, FlutterFlow has you covered.
3. Responsive Design: Building apps that look great on various devices is essential. FlutterFlow enables you to create responsive layouts that adapt seamlessly to different screen sizes and orientations.
4. Data Binding: Connect your app’s UI to data sources easily. FlutterFlow allows you to bind data from APIs or databases to your UI components, keeping your app’s content up-to-date.
5. Collaboration: Collaborate with team members in real-time. Whether you’re a solo developer or part of a team, FlutterFlow supports seamless collaboration, enhancing productivity.
1. Sign Up: To get started, sign up for a FlutterFlow account. You can choose from different pricing plans based on your needs.
2. Create a New Project: Once you’re in, create a new project and choose whether you’re building a mobile or web app.
3. Design Your App: Use the visual editor to design your app’s UI. Drag and drop widgets onto the canvas, arrange them, and customize their properties.
4. Add Functionality: Use the built-in logic builder to add functionality to your app. Define interactions, create conditional statements, and more – all without writing extensive code.
5. Preview and Test: Before deploying your app, use the preview feature to test how it looks and functions. Make adjustments as needed to ensure a seamless user experience.
6. Deploy Your App: Once you’re satisfied with your app, deploy it with just a few clicks. FlutterFlow takes care of the technical details, allowing you to focus on delivering an exceptional app.
In the fast-paced world of app development, tools like FlutterFlow are a game-changer. They empower developers to create robust and visually stunning applications without the worry of traditional coding methods. By harnessing the power of Google’s Flutter framework and adding a user-friendly visual interface, FlutterFlow is designed to redefine how we approach app development.
So whether you’re a startup founder looking to build a prototype, a developer aiming to speed up your workflow, or someone passionate about turning your app ideas into reality, FlutterFlow has everything you need to succeed.
For more information, please head over to our Hire Flutter Developer page and to develop a custom mobile application using Flutter, Hire Flutter Developer at HK Infosoft – we are destined to provide you with an innovative solution using the latest technology stacks. E-mail us any clock at – hello@hkinfosoft.com or Skype us: “hkinfosoft”.
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Only three months ago Google announced Flutter 3, a massive milestone that included stable support for all platforms! The good news is that the momentum since this major release has not slowed down. Since the release of Flutter 3, Flutter has merged 5,687 pull requests.
This release brings updates to Flutter web, desktop, text handling improvements in performance — and much more!
Until now, Flutter web apps didn’t match the expected behavior when attempting to select text. Like Flutter apps, native web applications are composed of a tree of elements. In a traditional web app, you can select multiple web elements with a single sweeping gesture, something that couldn’t be easily done on a Flutter web app.
Today that all changes! With the introduction of the SelectableArea widget, any child of the SelectableArea widget has selection enabled for free!
Pic courtesy: medium.com
To take advantage of this powerful new feature, simply wrap your route body (such as the Scaffold) with the SelectionArea widget and let Flutter do the rest.
Flutter 3.3 provides improved support for trackpad input. This not only provides richer and smoother control but also reduces misinterpretation in certain cases. For an example of this misinterpretation, check out the Drag a UI element page in the Flutter cookbook. Scroll to the bottom of the page to get to the DartPad instance, and perform the following steps:
Flutter now supports Scribble handwriting input using the Apple Pencil on iPadOS. This feature is enabled by default on CupertinoTextField, TextField, and EditableText. To enable this feature for your end users, simply upgrade to Flutter 3.3.
Pic courtesy: medium.com
To improve support for rich text editing, this release introduces the ability to receive granular text updates from the platform’s TextInputPlugin. Previously, the TextInputClient only delivered the new editing state with no delta between the old and new, TextEditingDeltas and the DeltaTextInputClient fill this information gap. Having access to these deltas allows you to build an input field with styled ranges that expand and contract as you type.
The Flutter team continues to migrate more Material Design 3 components to Flutter. This release includes updates to IconButton, Chips, and large and medium variants for AppBar.
Pic courtesy: medium.com
Pic courtesy: medium.com
Pic courtesy: medium.com
Previously, the Windows desktop application’s version was set by a file specific to the Windows application. This behavior was inconsistent with the way other platforms set their versions.
Windows desktop application versions can now be set from your projects pubspec.yaml file and build arguments. This makes it easier to enable auto updates for your end customers to get the latest and greatest when an application update is pushed.
When designing apps with complex navigation needs, things can get pretty hard to wrap your head around. To extend Flutter’s native navigation API, the team has published a new version of the go_router package, making it simpler to design routing logic that works across mobile, desktop, and the web.
The go router package, maintained by the Flutter team, simplifies routing by providing a declarative, url-based API, making it easier to navigate and handle deep-links. The latest version (4.3) enables apps to redirect using asynchronous code, and includes other breaking changes described in the migration guide.
The Visual Studio Code extension for Flutter has several updates including improvements for adding dependencies. You can now add multiple, comma-separated dependencies in one step using Dart: Add Dependency.
Pic courtesy: medium.com
This release increases the performance of loading images from assets by eliminating copies and reducing Dart garbage collection (GC) pressure. Previously, when loading asset images, the ImageProvider API required the compressed data to be copied multiple times. First, it was copied into the native heap when opening the asset and exposing it to Dart as a typed data array. Then, it was copied a second time when that typed data array was copied to the internal storage of a ui.ImmutableBuffer.
With the addition of ui.ImmutableBuffer.fromAsset, compressed image bytes can be loaded directly into the structure used for decoding. This approach requires changes to the byte loading pipeline of ImageProviders. This process is also faster because it bypasses some additional scheduling overhead required bythe previous method channel-based loader. In particular, image loading time improved by nearly 2x in our microbenchmarks.
Pic courtesy: medium.com
In the 2.10 stable release, they enabled Dart’s pointer compression optimization on iOS.Dart’s pointer compression works by reserving a large virtual memory region for Dart’s heap. Since the total virtual memory allocation allowed on iOS is less than on other platforms, this large reservation reduces the amount of memory available for use by other components that reserve their own memory, for example, Flutter plugins.
While disabling pointer compression increases the memory consumed by Dart objects, it also increases the memory available for non-Dart parts of a Flutter application, which is more desirable overall.
Apple provides an entitlement that can increase the maximum allowed virtual memory allocation for an application, however this entitlement is only supported on newer iOS versions, and wouldn’t work on devices running versions of iOS that Flutter still supports. When we are able to use this entitlement everywhere, we intend to revisit this optimization.
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”.
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The recent release of Flutter v3.0 is now stable for macOS and Linux, in addition to Windows!
There are several exciting things coming as part of this release, including the update on Flutter’s support for macOS and Linux, significant performance improvements, mobile and web updates — and much more!
Linux and macOS have reached stable and include the following features:
You can now create platform-rendered menu bars on macOS using the PlatformMenuBar widget, which supports the insertion of platform-only menus, and control over what appears in the macOS application menus.
International text input, including for languages that make use of text input method editors (IMEs) such as Chinese, Japanese, and Korean is fully-supported on all three desktop platforms, including third-party input methods such as Sogou and Google Japanese Input.
Flutter for Windows, macOS, and Linux supports accessibility services such as screen-readers, accessible navigation, and inverted colors.
As of Flutter 3, Flutter macOS desktop apps are built as universal binaries, with native support for both existing Intel-based Macs and Apple’s latest Apple Silicon devices.
With this release, it has raised the recommended Windows version for development to Windows 10. While there isn’t any blocking development on older versions (Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1), these versions are no longer supported by Microsoft and there is limited testing on these releases.
Updates to mobile platforms include the following:
The Flutter 3 release supports foldable mobile devices. In a collaboration spearheaded by Microsoft, new features and widgets allow you to create dynamic and delightful experiences on foldable devices.
As part of this work, MediaQuery now contains a list of DisplayFeatures, describing the bounds and states of device elements like hinges, folds, and cutouts. Additionally, the DisplayFeatureSubScreen widget now positions its child widget without overlapping the bounds of DisplayFeatures, and has already been integrated with the framework’s default dialogs and pop-ups, making Flutter aware and responsive to these elements out of the box.
Pic courtesy: medium.com
Flutter now supports variable refresh rate on iOS devices with ProMotion displays, including iPhone 13 Pro and iPad Pro. On these devices, Flutter apps can render at refresh rates reaching 120 hz, which were previously limited to 60 hz. This results in a smoother experience during fast animations such as scrolling. See flutter.dev/go/variable-refresh-rate for more details.
If you create a new project with the Flutter tool, you might notice that the generated files now use the latest versions of the Gradle and Android Gradle plugins. For existing projects, you need to manually bump the versions to 7.4 for Gradle, and 7.1.2 for the Android Gradle plugin.
Updates for web apps include the following:
Flutter web now automatically detects and uses the ImageDecoder API in browsers that support it. As of today, most Chromium-based browsers (Chrome, Edge, Opera, Samsung Browser, and more) have added this API.
The new API decodes images asynchronously off the main thread using the browser’s built-in image codecs. This speeds up image decoding by 2x, and it never blocks the main thread, removing all jank that was previously caused by images.
The new lifecycle API for Flutter web apps gives you the flexibility to control the bootstrap process of your Flutter app from the hosting HTML page, and helps Lighthouse analyze the performance of your app. This applies to many use-cases, including the following frequently requested scenarios:
A splash screen.
A loading indicator.
A plain HTML interactive landing page displayed before the Flutter app.
Updates to Flutter and Dart tooling include:
Version 2.0 of the lint packages have been released:
Flutter: https://pub.dev/packages/flutter_lints/versions/2.0.0
Dart: https://pub.dev/packages/lints/versions/2.0.0
Apps generated in Flutter 3 with flutter create automatically enable the v2.0 sets of lints. Existing apps, packages, and plugins are encouraged to migrate to v2.0 to follow the latest and greatest best practices in the Flutter world, by running flutter pub upgrade –major-versions flutter_lints.
Most of the newly added lint warnings in v2 come with automated fixes. So, after upgrading to the latest package version in your app’s pubspec.yaml file, you can run dart fix —-apply over your code base to fix most lint warnings automatically (some warnings still require some manual work). Apps, packages, or plugins that aren’t using package:flutter_lints yet can migrate by following the migration guide.
Thanks to open source contributor knopp, partial repaint has been enabled on Android devices that support it. In our local testing this change cut average, 90th percentile, and 99th percentile frame rasterization times on the backdrop_filter_perf benchmark on a Pixel 4 XL device by 5x. Partial repaint when there is a single rectangular dirty region is now enabled on both iOS and newer Android devices.
It has further improved the performance of opacity animations in simple cases. In particular, when an Opacity widget contains only a single rendering primitive, the saveLayer method that is usually invoked by Opacity is omitted. In a benchmark constructed to measure the benefits of this optimization, rasterization time for this case improved by an order of magnitude.
Other updates to the Flutter ecosystem include the following:
Flutter 3 supports Material Design 3, the next generation of Material Design. Flutter 3 provides opt-in support for Material 3; this includes Material You features like dynamic color, an updated color system and typography, updates to many components, and new visual effects introduced in Android 12 like a new touch ripple design and a stretch overscroll effect. Try the Material 3 features in the new Take your Flutter app from Boring to Beautiful codelab.
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.
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We can’t believe it’s time again for a Flutter 2.10 stable release!
There are several exciting things to announce as part of this release, including a big update on Flutter’s support for Windows, several significant performance improvements, new support for icons and colors in the framework, and some tooling improvements. In addition, we’ve got some updates on the removal of the dev channel, reduction in support for older versions of iOS, and a short list of breaking changes. Let’s get to it!
First and foremost, the Flutter 2.10 release brings with it the stable release of Windows support. You no longer need to flip a flag to get the functionality that produces Windows apps on the stable channel of Flutter — now it’s available by default!
Of course, we did a lot more than just flip a flag. This release includes extensive improvements for text handling, keyboard handling, and keyboard shortcuts, as well as new integrations directly into Windows, with support for command-line arguments, globalized text entry, and accessibility.
For much more on the Windows stable launch, see the Announcing Flutter for Windows blog post, which describes the architecture of Flutter on Windows that allows for deep integration and gives you a sense of just how many Flutter packages and plugins already support Windows. You can also see some examples of what our tooling and app partners are doing with Flutter on Windows!
This release of Flutter includes initial support for dirty region management provided by Flutter community member knopp. He’s enabled partial repaints for a single dirty region on iOS/Metal. This change reduced 90th and 99th percentile rasterization times on a few benchmarks by an order of magnitude, and reduced GPU utilization on these benchmarks from more than 90% to less than 10%.
Pic courtesy: medium.com
We expect to bring the benefits of partial repaints to other platforms in future releases.
In the Flutter 2.8 release, we landed our own internal picture recording format. Now in Flutter 2.10, we’ve started building optimizations with it. As an example, one common case of opacity layers is now implemented much more efficiently. Even in the worst case, frame raster times in our benchmarks fell to under a third of their previous value.
Pic courtesy: medium.com
We expect this optimization to expand to cover more cases as we continue developing the picture recording format.
In profile and release modes, Dart code is compiled ahead of time to native machine code. The key to the efficiency and small size of this code is a whole program type flow analysis that unlocks many compiler optimizations and aggressive tree-shaking. However, as the type flow analysis must cover the whole program, it can be somewhat expensive. This release includes a faster implementation of type flow analysis. Overall build time for the Flutter app in our benchmarks fell by ~10%.
Pic courtesy: medium.com
As always, performance enhancements, reduced memory usage, and reduced latency are a priority for the Flutter team. Look forward to further improvements in future releases.
In addition to performance improvements, we’ve also added some platform-specific features and enhancements. One new enhancement is smoother keyboard animations in iOS from luckysmg, which is provided automatically to your app without you having to do a thing.
Pic courtesy: medium.com
We’ve also improved the stability of the camera plugin for iOS by fixing a few edge case crashes.
Finally, 64-bit iOS architectures get a new feature to reduce memory usage: compressed pointers.
A 64-bit architecture represents pointers as a 8-byte data structure. When you have a lot of objects, the space taken up by the pointers themselves adds to the overall memory usage of your app, especially if you have larger, more complicated apps that have more GC churn. However, your iOS app is very unlikely to have enough objects to require a significant portion of even the 32-bit address space (2 billion objects), let alone the enormity of the 64-bit address space (9 million billion objects).
Compressed pointers were provided in Dart 2.15 and in this release of Flutter, we use them to reduce the memory usage for 64-bit iOS apps. You can check out the Dart 2.15 blog post for details.
And while you’re reading Dart blog posts, don’t forget to check out the Dart 2.16 announcement for updates on supporting Flutter for Windows with package platform tagging and a new search experience on pub.dev.
This release contains a number of improvements for Android as well. By default, when you create a new app, Flutter defaults to support the latest version of Android, version 12 (API level 31). Also, in this release, we’ve enabled multidex support automatically. If your app supports Android SDK versions below 21, and it exceeds the 64K method limit, simply pass the –multidex flag to flutter build appbundle or flutter build apk and your app will support multidex.
And last but not least, we listened to your feedback that Gradle error messages can be intimidating. For this reason, the Flutter tool now suggests resolution steps to common issues. For example, if you add a plugin to your app that requires you to increase the minimum supported Android SDK version, you now see a “Flutter Fix” suggestion in the logs.
Pic courtesy: medium.com
We continue to add more suggestions to common error messages, and would love to get your feedback on other error messages where this treatment would be useful.
This release contains some improvements on the web as well. For example, in previous releases, when scrolling to the edge of a multiline TextField on the web, it wouldn’t scroll properly. This release introduces edge scrolling for text selection: when the selection moves outside of the text field, the field scrolls to view the scroll extent. This new behavior is available for both web and desktop apps.
Pic courtesy: medium.com
In addition, this release of Flutter includes another notable improvement in the web. We’re always looking to reduce the overhead of our mapping of Flutter to the web. In previous versions, every time we wanted to bring a native HTML widget into your Flutter app, we needed an overlay as part of our platform view support for the web. Each one of these overlays enables custom painting but represents a certain amount of overhead. If you have a large number of native HTML widgets in your app, such as links, that adds up to a lot of overhead. With this release, we’ve created a new “non-painting platform view” for the web that essentially removes that overhead. And we’ve taken advantage of this optimization in the Link widget, which means if you have many links in your Flutter web app, they no longer represent any significant overhead at all. We’ll be applying this optimization to other widgets over time.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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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.
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:
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.
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.
Even though we’ve just reached the alpha release, the Flutter community has already been working on plugins for Windows. Here are a few:
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.
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.
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L8J 0J3
57 Sherway St,
Stoney Creek, ON
L8J 0J3
606, Suvas Scala,
S P Ring Road, Nikol,
Ahmedabad 380049
1131 Baycrest Drive,
Wesley Chapel,
FL 33544
57 Sherway St,
Stoney Creek, ON
L8J 0J3
606, Suvas Scala,
S P Ring Road, Nikol,
Ahmedabad 380049
1131 Baycrest Drive,
Wesley Chapel,
FL 33544
606, Suvas Scala,
Nr. Parikh Hospitals, S P Ring Road,
Nikol, Ahmedabad - 380049, Gujarat, India.
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