Google launches Flutter 1.2, its first feature update, at Mobile World Congress 2019

At the ongoing Mobile World Congress event, Google announced the release of Flutter 1.2, yesterday. This first feature update comes with support for Android App Bundles, improved Material and Cupertino widget sets, and more.

Mobile World Congress is a four-day event, starting from 25th of this month. It is the largest annual gathering, where some of the world’s leading companies of the mobile industry talk about their latest innovations and technology.

Following are some of the updates Flutter 1.2 includes:

Improved Material and Cupertino widget sets

The team has been putting their efforts into improving the Material and Cupertino widget sets. Now developers will have more flexibility when using Material widgets. For Cupertino widgets, they have added support for floating cursor text adding on iOS. This can be triggered by either force pressing the keyboard or by long pressing the spacebar.

Support for Android App Bundles

Flutter 1.2 supports Android App Bundles, a new upload format that includes all the app’s compiled code and resources. This format helps in reducing the app size and enables new features like dynamic delivery for Android apps.

Support for Dart 2.2 SDK

This release includes the Dart 2.2 SDK, which was also released yesterday. Dart 2.2 comes with significant performance improvements to make ahead-of-time compilation even faster and a literal language for initializing sets. It also introduces Dart Common Front End (CFE) that parses Dart code, performs type inference, and translates Dart into a lower-level intermediate language.

Other updates

Flutter 1.2 also supports a broader set of animation easing functions, which are inspired by Robert Penner’s work. The team is already preparing it for desktop-class operating systems by adding new keyboard events and mouse hover support.

Flutter’s plug-in team has added some changes to Flutter 1.2 that will work well to support the In App Purchases plugin. Along with these updates, they have also made some bug fixes for video player, webview, and maps.

Along with Flutter 1.2, the team has also released a preview of Dart DevTools, a suite of performance tools for Dart and Flutter. Some of the tools from this suite including web inspector, timeline view, and others are now available for installation.

Read the full set of updates in Flutter 1.2 on the Google Developers blog.

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