Flutter

Google’s Flutter SDK shares new release schedule, massive growth in India and China

Kyle Bradshaw | Apr 22 2020 - 8:00 am PT

Over the last two years, Google’s massively cross-platform Flutter SDK has seen significant growth both to their team and to the number of developers making Flutter apps worldwide. Today, the Flutter team is sharing some insights into how that growth will affect their release schedule going forward.

The core concept of Google’s Flutter SDK, the ability to write an app once and have it work on a variety of platforms, is undoubtedly a promising one for developers, and Flutter has backed that up with incredible customizability as best seen in their recent Flutter Clock contest.

In fact, Flutter has caught people’s attention and excitement around the world, leading to a growing number of Flutter developers — nearly 500,000 developers using Flutter each month — and a similarly growing team of Googlers working on Flutter. In particular, Flutter has recently seen an incredible boom of new developers in India and China, becoming the top two countries in number Flutter developers, respectively, overtaking the United States.

Further, there’s been an increase in the number of enterprise customers who choose to use Flutter for their applications, with Google sharing Nubank as a prime example.

As part of an effort to better support this growing community of developers and blossoming enterprise use, Flutter is going to be switching to a new release process, more akin to that of Google Chrome. Previously, the team would occasionally select a seemingly stable point in the code’s history to become a “Dev” build, and eventually a particularly stable Dev build would be selected to be the next beta release.

In the new process, an initial Dev build is selected for the next release and branched off. From there, the Flutter team will apply fixes and improvements directly to that branch until it’s ready for more developers to test as a Beta release. The main takeaway here is that beta versions of the Flutter SDK should be even more stable than before, and the final stable releases will have gone through more stages of testing and fixes.

To that end, the team is also planning to launch the next stable Flutter release next week, though Google is not yet sharing any details about the update.