Hybrid App Development Tag

Kotlin Vs Flutter – The future of Android Development in year 2024

Introduction

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:

1. Popularity and Community Support

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.

2. Learning Curve

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.

3. UI/UX Development

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.

4. Code Sharing

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.

5. Performance

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.

6. Testing

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.

Conclusion

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”.

To develop Android Mobile Apps, please visit our technology page.

Content Source:

1. Flutter Official Documentation
2. Kotlin Official Documentation

No-code App Development Using FlutterFlow

Are you looking to revolutionize your app development workflow?

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.

What is FlutterFlow?

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.

Key Features of FlutterFlow

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.

Getting Started with FlutterFlow

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.

Conclusion

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”.

Content Source:

1. flutterflow.io

What’s new in Flutter 3.3

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!

Framework

Global Selection

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.

Trackpad input

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:

1. Size the window smaller so that the upper part presents a scrollbar
2. Hover over the upper part
3. Use a trackpad to scroll
4. Prior to installing Flutter 3.3, scrolling on a trackpad drags the item because Flutter was dispatching emulated general events
5. After installing Flutter 3.3, scrolling on a trackpad correctly scrolls the list because Flutter is delivering the “scrolling” gesture, which isn’t recognized by the cards, but is recognized by the scroll view

Scribble

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

Text input

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.

Material Design 3

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.

IconButton

Pic courtesy: medium.com

Chip

Pic courtesy: medium.com

Medium and large AppBar

Pic courtesy: medium.com

Desktop

Windows

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.

Packages

go_router

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.

VS Code extension enhancements

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

Performance

Raster cache improvements

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

Stability

iOS pointer compression disabled

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”.

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

Content Source:

1. medium.com

What’s new in Flutter 3

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!

Ready for production on all desktop platforms

Linux and macOS have reached stable and include the following features:

Cascading menus and support for the macOS system menu bar

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.

Full support for international text input on all desktop platforms

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.

Accessibility on all desktop platforms

Flutter for Windows, macOS, and Linux supports accessibility services such as screen-readers, accessible navigation, and inverted colors.

Universal binaries by default on macOS

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.

Deprecating Windows 7/8 for development

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.

Mobile updates

Updates to mobile platforms include the following:

Foldable phone support

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

iOS variable refresh rate support

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.

Gradle version update

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.

Web updates

Updates for web apps include the following:

Image decoding

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.

Web app lifecycles

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.

Tooling updates

Updates to Flutter and Dart tooling include:

Updated lint package

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.

Performance improvements

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.

More exciting updates

Other updates to the Flutter ecosystem include the following:

Material 3

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.

Content Source:

1. medium.com

What’s new in Flutter 2.10

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!

Ready for production apps on Windows

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!

Performance improvements

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.

iOS updates

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.

Android updates

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.

Web updates

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.

Content Source:

1. medium.com

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