Flutter Forward 2023: the 7 most interesting new features

Flutter Forward 2023, the event created by Google to present the features that will be added to Flutter in the near future, was held on January 25.

In our Digital & App Innovation Unit we have been focusing on Flutter technology that allows us to develop cross-platform apps with performance very close to native languages. So we have been following the Flutter Forward with great interest: here are the 7 most interesting new features that will be introduced with the new version of the technology.

With the3.7 update of Flutter, more widgets have been ported to Google’s new Material 3 standard. This migration leads to improvements to the framework especially in the areas of animations, typography and color schemes.

Flutter will allow developers who want to create applications adaptable to different screen sizes the use of the adaptive layout and LayoutBuilder widget that can be used to create responsive applications that fit perfectly on the screen regardless of size or aspect ratio.

During the event, a preview of Impeller, Flutter’s new graphics engine, was also shown. The switch from Skia to Impeller will bring huge performance improvements, and in fact the Flutter team promises to have applications maintain 60 FPS in almost all situations, with the exception of a few borderline cases.

These two code generation tools were added in the latest version of Flutter and can be used to automatically generate MethodChannels to communicate with the operating system on which the application is running. Currently, FFIgen is responsible for generating bindings for iOS code and JNIgen for Android code.

3D support for Flutter applications using the Scene and Node Widgets was also presented. Since the feature is fully integrated with the Flutter Engine, it will be possible to use it with the Flame engine or other libraries for creating games in Flutter. Support is still in an experimental state, but will become more stable and mature in versions after 3.7

From version 3.7 Flutter will support the development of web applications that run on the Web Assembly standard, thus extremely high-performance applications with low latencies. Support for RISC-V, on the other hand, will allow the development of applications that run on devices based on the RISC-V architecture.
Web assembly support will allow Flutter to run its web applications with performance extremely similar to native. Instead, thanks to RISC-V support, Flutter will be open to developing applications for new devices such as IoT systems.

The last very interesting feature that was presented waselement embedding. Thanks to this feature it will be possible to embed a Flutter application inside an HTML page with data passing and also a state transfer on both sides. This means that you will be able to embed a fully functional flutter application on any web page.

This will make it possible to integrate Flutter applications into even larger web projects without having to change the entire project structure, and this makes Flutter even more versatile for creating web apps.