Google simultaneously releases Flutter SDK 1.2 and Dart programming language 2.2

At last year’s MWC, Google announced that their Flutter app development SDK was ready to move from alpha to beta testing. Today at MWC 2019, Flutter is getting its second stable release, version 1.2, combined with the release of version 2.2 of the Dart programming language.

Flutter, Google’s cross-platform app development SDK lets developers use the Dart programming language to make great looking apps for Android & iOS (and soon Fuchsia, Windows, macOS, and the web). Google has promised that Flutter would see a new stable release once every quarter after its initial release at Flutter Live last year.

Flutter 1.2

Flutter 1.2, releasing today, continues to put a focus on making the Flutter experience as stable and performant as possible. Beyond that, the team has been striving for Flutter to offer a “faithful representation” of many iOS UI elements including the text cursor. Additionally, Flutter now proudly supports iOS’ floating cursor for text.

Another interesting addition in Flutter 1.2 is support for Android’s new App Bundles, a hotly requested feature by Flutter developers. This support should help to reduce the initial installation size of your app and make it possible to do more exciting things like dynamic delivery, which lets users install additional features.

One strong sign of Flutter’s success is its number of third-party code contributions. For example, Flutter 1.2’s new App Bundles support was contributed by a developer from Intuit.

Another investment the Flutter team has made is into a third debugging tool for Flutter and Dart applications to complement Visual Studio Code and Android Studio, called Dart DevTools. It’s actually a web-based application that lets you inspect widgets, view logs, and do full application debugging right from your web browser.

Dart 2.2

Flutter and Dart developers alike will be happy to know that Dart 2.2 is also being released today. Flutter developers should notice that Dart 2.2 offers a 15-20% boost to performance. Additionally, the language has gained the ability to write Set literals using curly braces { }, similar to Python and other languages. This makes it possible to create a Set as a constant.

Dart 2.2 is available for download now, and is also bundled in with today’s Flutter 1.2 release. You can also play with Dart 2.2 now in the official DartPad web app.