Our phones are only as good as the apps they run, and over the past few years, we've seen mobile apps get faster, prettier, and more powerful.
Flutter is a new tool from Google that wants to keep this trend going, and during MWC 2018, Flutter received its first official beta.
Flutter launched in an alpha stage last year, and the release of its new beta signifies a big step in its continuous development cycle. It's a mobile UI framework that's designed to make it easy for developers to create high-quality apps that run fast and look great, and it's targeted at app development for both Android and iOS.
Per Google's announcement post, some of Flutter's highlights include:
- High-velocity development with features like stateful Hot Reload, a new reactive framework, rich widget set, and integrated tooling.
- Expressive and flexible designs with composable widget sets, rich animation libraries, and a layered extensible architecture.
- High-quality experiences across devices and platforms with our portable, GPU-accelerated renderer and high-performance, native ARM code runtime, and platform interop.
Since its alpha launch, Google's worked with its development community to add new features to Flutter, such as support for screen readers, development for the iPhone X and iOS 11, more image formatting, inline videos, etc.
Google says Flutter is a great tool for beginners and advanced developers alike, and you can start using it right now on Windows, Linux, and macOS. While many of you reading this may never personally work with Flutter, its beta should hopefully signify more apps in the near future that look and run even better than what we already have.
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