Google updates its cross-platform Flutter UI toolkit
Flutter, Google's cross-platform UI toolkit for building mobile and desktop apps, is getting a small but important update at the company's I/O conference today. Google also announced that Flutter now powers 200,000 apps in the Play Store alone, including popular apps from companies like WeChat, ByteDance, BMW, Grab and DiDi. Indeed, Google notes that one in eight new apps in the Play Store are now Flutter apps.
The launch of Flutter 2.2 follows Google's rollout of Flutter 2, which first added support for desktop and web apps in March, so it's no surprise that this is a relatively minor release. In many ways, the update builds on top of the features the company introduced in version 2 and its reliability and performance improvements.
Version 2.2 makes null safety the default for new projects, for example, to add protections against null reference exceptions. As for performance, web apps can now use background caching using service workers, for example, while Android apps can use deferred components and iOS apps get support for precompiled shaders to make first runs smoother.
