Google I/O 2021: Flutter 2.2 features new payment plugin as it hits 200,000-plus apps on Google Play
At Google I/O, new features were announced for the next version of Flutter, Google's open source UI development kit.
The open source UI toolkit known as Flutter has a new version—Flutter 2.2. Unveiled at Google I/O on Tuesday, there are new features that include a way for developers to monetize their apps with in-app purchases and ads. Developers can also connect to cloud services, and there are APIs that extend apps to support new capabilities.
There are currently more than 200,000 apps in the Google Play store that use Flutter, including WeChat, MyBMW, Grab, eBay Motors and ByteDance, which is the company behind TikTok, explained Zoey Fan, product manager on the Flutter team.
Fan said, "ByteDance currently has more than 70 apps using Flutter. Their engineers told us, after switching to Flutter, their productivity actually improved 30%. They could ship new features and apps 30% faster compared with previous native development, because now they no longer have to build for two, like iOS or Android, they can ship with one single code base."
Flutter was originally released in 2018, but it's been growing quickly, with 47% growth from Q1 2020 and Q1 2021, according to SlashData's Mobile Developer Population Forecast 2021. According to SlashData, in the past 30 days, more than one in eight new apps in the Play Store were built with Flutter.
