Flutter 1.9 Adds Support for macOS Catalina and iOS 13
Google announced the release of Flutter 1.9 and that support for web apps has been integrated into the framework’s main repository.
“Flutter 1.9 is our biggest update yet with more than 1,500 [GitHub pull requests] from more than 100 contributors,” Google’s Chris Sells writes. “The new features and updates span a wide range, from support for macOS Catalina and iOS 13 to improved tooling support, as well as new Dart language features and new Material widgets. We also announced a major milestone for Flutter’s web support, with the successful integration of Flutter’s web support into the main Flutter repository, allowing developers to write for mobile, desktop and web with the same codebase.”
So, yes, it’s a big day for Flutter, Google’s cross-platform developer framework. Here’s a breakdown of what’s new.
macOS Catalina and iOS 13 support. This is timely, since both are shipping later today, along with Xcode 11, which is also now supported. That said, support for iOS 13’s dark mode is still in progress.
New Material widgets. For developers targeting Android, Flutter 1.9 supports several new Material design widgets, including Toggle Buttons and Color Filter.
More languages. Flutter 1.9 supports an additional 24 new languages.
Dart 2.5. Dart, the C-like language underlying Flutter, has been updated to version 2.5, which provides machine learning-powered code completions for the IDE and a pre-release of Foreign Function Interface (FFI) support, providing native extensions so Dart can call directly into code written in C.
New language defaults. Now, new projects default to Swift instead of Objective-C and Kotlin instead of Java for iOS and Android projects respectively.
But the big one, of course, is support for Flutter on the web.
“Web support has been merged into the main flutter repository,” Sells explains. “What this means is that if you have the latest builds of Flutter from the master or dev channel, you can target the web with the latest experimental version of Flutter … Support for web output with Flutter is still at an early phase, but this release represents a major step forward towards enabling production support for web development with Flutter.”