Google releases Flutter 1.9 at GDD (Google Developer Days) conference

Last week, the team behind Flutter made an announcement at Google Developer Days about the stable release of Flutter 1.9. Flutter 1.9 has received more than 1,500 PRs (Pull Requests) from more than 100 contributors. It comes with support for macOS Catalina and iOS 13, improved tooling support, new Dart language features, new Material widgets and much more.

The team also announced the successful integration of Flutter’s web support into the main Flutter repository that will allow developers to write for desktop, mobile as well as web with the same codebase. Tencent, the well-known internet brand also uses Flutter in their mobile apps.

https://twitter.com/Appinventiv/status/1171689785733173248

https://twitter.com/ZoeyFan723/status/1171566234892210176

What’s new in Flutter 1.9

Support for macOS Catalina and iOS 13

Since Apple is planning to release Catalina, the latest version of macOS, the team at Flutter has updated the end-to-end tooling experience so that it works properly with Catalina and Xcode 11. Support has been added for the new Xcode build system that enables 64-bit support throughout the toolchain and simplifies platform dependencies.

This release also includes an implementation of the iOS 13 draggable toolbar, along with support for vibration feedback, long-press and drag-from-right. The team is also working on iOS dark mode that has a number of pull requests already merged.

Flutter users can now turn on experimental support for Bitcode that is Apple’s platform-independent intermediate representation of a compiled program.

Material components in Flutter 1.9

The Material design components and features have been updated in Flutter 1.9. This release comes with new widgets that include ToggleButtons and ColorFiltered.

Dart 2.5

As a part of the Flutter 1.9 release, the team is also releasing Dart 2.5 that includes support for pre-release of Foreign Function Interface (FFI).

New projects default to Swift and Kotlin in Flutter 1.9

With this release, new projects default to Swift and Kotlin instead of Objective-C and Java for iOS and Android respectively. Since a lot of packages are written in Swift, making it as a default language would remove the manual work for adding those packages.

Flutter on the web

The team also announced that the flutter_web repository has been deprecated and web support has been merged into the main flutter repository.

It seems users are quite excited about this news.

https://twitter.com/max_myracle/status/1171530782340304899

https://twitter.com/annnoo96/status/1171442355875938304

To know more about this news, check out the official post.