Flutter

Flutter SDK 1.20 brings autofill support, updated Material UI, more

Kyle Bradshaw | Aug 5 2020 - 8:00 am PT

Google’s massively cross-platform Flutter SDK is launching a new update today, version 1.20, bringing autofill support to mobile developers, improvements to some common Material Design widgets, and more.

Flutter has been growing at an incredible pace over the past few months, especially in India and China. Since Google last shared statistics on Flutter, the number of Flutter apps in the Play Store alone has nearly doubled from ~50,000 to upwards of 90,000.

To continue to serve their growing developer community, Google’s Flutter team has been hard at work to make existing apps better by improving performance and reducing app install sizes. With the release of Flutter 1.20 — and Dart 2.9 — Flutter is delivering even smaller app sizes, less janky starting animations, and faster handling of UTF-8 strings.

The Flutter team is also listening to and delivering on developer feedback, with Flutter 1.20 delivering autofill support on Android and iOS, which has been one of the most common requests. Developers will also find a convenient new “InteractiveViewer” widget which makes common things like pan, zoom, and drag & drop easier than ever before in Flutter.

For those who use Google’s Material Design widgets, as opposed to the iOS-like Cupertino widgets or something custom made, Flutter 1.20 includes upgrades to the Slider, RangeSlider, and DatePicker widgets to be in-line with the latest Material Design guidelines, as well as a complete redesign of the TimePicker widget.

Also, to help Flutter developers be more productive, Google has been working on improving Flutter and Dart’s tools. For example, the Dart DevTools suite can now be accessed directly from inside of Visual Studio Code, keeping everything important in one window. Additionally, Google has a new (pre-release) tool called Pigeon that makes it easier to develop plugins with platform-specific code or integrate Flutter into your existing native app.

Flutter 1.20 and Dart 2.9 are available now for you to upgrade to or download directly.