Google recently released the Flutter 1.22 version with a lot of features, with extensive support for iOS 14 and Android 11. Flutter 1.22 is the newest quarterly update for the UI framework. It promises to enable developers build UIs for multiple platforms from a single codebase.
As in this season we got freshly launched Android 11 and iOS 14, which are reaching smartphones around the world, this release aims on ensuring that Android 11 and iOS 14 work great with Flutter.
A lot of work has been done to update both operating systems to meet the latest SDKs and make sure that everything goes through a large set of tests. For iOS 14, this release includes support for the new Xcode 12, new icons, and preview support for the new iOS 14 App Clips feature. Flutter has also included “Cupertino” style on the expanded set of icons that Apple added with iOS 14. For Android 11, the update supports new types of display cutouts, as well as proper animation when calling the soft keyboard.
There are also a few corrections and bug fixes in Flutter targeting apps built for iOS 14. Since Xcode 12 requires iOS 9.0 or up, Flutter’s default has changed from iOS 8.0 to iOS 9.0.
Additionally they have established a preview of one of the very demanded features for Android: state restoration, a new world of Material buttons, new international and localization support which works with hot reload, a new Navigator, a stable release for Platform Views, and a switch you can add in your code to improve scrolling on devices with high frequency displays. They also got a new tool for analyzing app size and for ensuring that the plugins that you’re building support only the platforms that you want to support.
Now the next big preview feature, which came with Flutter 1.22, is “state restoration” for Android, or in other words, the feature for a Flutter app to be automatically closed in the background and resumed without losing your place. State restoration will still need some effort from a developer’s part to get working properly, but in the future, it should help Flutter apps feel even more native on Android.
The Flutter 1.22 update may have come quickly after the previous one, but there is so much new good functions, that this article couldn’t cover all of them.
