Flutter 1.9 and Dart 2.5 released w/ iOS 13 support, ML-based code complete, and more

At Google Developer Days China, Google has announced the simultaneous release of Flutter 1.9 and version 2.5 of the underlying Dart programming language, with a variety of new features like iOS 13 support.

If you’ve not heard of it by now, Flutter is an app development framework from Google that can help you make apps for almost everything — Android, iOS, Fuchsia, desktop, the web and more — using the Dart programming language.

Flutter 1.9

Flutter 1.9 is releasing just in time for the announcement of iOS 13’s official launch, and has prepared accordingly with new UI features like the draggable toolbar. On a similar note, Flutter 1.9 is prepped for use with macOS Catalina, including Xcode 11 support.

While one the most exciting features of iOS 13, dark mode, isn’t supported by Flutter on iOS just yet, the work is reportedly well under way. In the meantime, you can get a feel for how Flutter 1.9 handles dark mode, as it natively supports Android 10’s dark mode toggle.

Flutter 1.9 also marks a significant milestone for the framework. New Flutter projects now default to using Swift and Kotlin instead of Objective-C and Java for their base app code. While many Flutter developers may never need to tap into these native interfaces, having the more modern language as the default should make native app code more accessible.

Dart 2.5

Another major part of the Flutter 1.9 release is the inclusion of version 2.5 of the Dart programming language, which is also releasing today for use outside of Flutter. Along with some updates to constants, Dart 2.5 brings technical previews of two wild new features for the language.

To help make it easier than ever to write your Flutter and Dart apps, Dart 2.5 includes a preview of a new machine learning based code completion system. Powered by TensorFlow Lite and the many open source Dart repositories on GitHub, this new code complete system attempts to offer the most relevant suggestions first instead of just offering all of your options alphabetically.

Developers familiar with low-level languages will also be interested in Dart 2.5’s preview of the “foreign function interface,” which allows you to call into code written in C from Dart and Flutter. This allows your app to access powerful system APIs and libraries written in C for desktop platforms and the Android NDK.

Flutter 1.9 powered by Dart 2.5 is available for download or upgrade now.