Blog Post

Flutter 2.8 Release Note
Technology

Quick Recap Of Flutter 2.8 Release Note With Notable Features And Improvements

Sagar Bagsariya,

Is this Google’s Christmas gift for Flutter developers before two weeks? I mean, look at the Flutter 2.8 release note. 2,424 PRs are merged together with closing 2,976 issues, and they said it’s the final stable release of the year. I bet we would be hearing more Flutter announcements if there were just a few more days to come in the year.

Anyway, all this wouldn’t happen without Flutter’s progressively growing community. In fact, it took 207 contributors and 178 reviewers’ devotion behind announcing Flutter 2.8. And their hard work has paid off in terms of crucial performance improvements and a bunch of new features in nearly every aspect of Flutter cross-platform development.

Being a Flutter App Development Company, we work continuously on the platform. So, whenever improvements and new features roll out, our hearts and minds go flutter in excitement. Assuming you want to know more about Flutter 2.8 features to make a decision for your project, let’s dive right into it.

FLUTTER 2.8 UPDATE: TOP IMPROVEMENTS AND FEATURES YOU MUST KNOW ARE HERE!

Startup Latency is reduced by 50%!!

One of the significant improvements Flutter developers have brought— improved startup latency. They have tested these improvements against a famous and large Google app with over 1 million code lines, Google Play. Consequently, the app achieved a 50% reduction when running on a low-end Android device and a 10% improvement on high-end devices— said Chris Sells (Google Product Manager on the Flutter development experience).

Therefore, now Flutter apps will start faster, using less memory than before, which makes them more performant.

New Feature And Support In Flutter DevTools 

The problem with non-performant applications is often not widgets build but layouts or paints. So, to resolve this debugging issue, they have added a new feature called “Enhance Tracing.” This will make it easy to see UI jank in your timeline by enabling track widgets, track layouts, track paints, and fixing them.

Moreover, Flutter 2.8 release brought new support for profiling the app’s startup performance. It is a significant update because it doesn’t look good for your new users when your app takes so much time or janks at startup.

Improvements in Web Platform Views

All those who use Flutter for the web with platform views, it’s good news for you. Unlike previous versions, Flutter 2.8 reuses already created canvases for earlier platform views. Because of that, you can now have multiple HtmlElementView instances in your web apps, reducing scrolling jank when using them. And above all, without compromising performance.

WebView 3.0 

With Flutter 2.8, you get the webview_flutter plugin version 3.0 coupled with some handy features such as:

  • Support for POST as well as GET for populating content 
  • Loading HTML from files and strings 
  • Transparent background support
  • Writing cookies prior to loading content

So, now, if you have Terms Of Services documents in HTML and want to show them to your users, you don’t have to create a separate version of your application.

Furthermore, to answer “What does hosting a WebView look like in a Flutter web app?” they have provided webview_flutter to provide support for the web. However, it’s said to have support for simple URL loading without the ability to interact or control. — check out the webview_flutter_web)

General Availability Of Flutter Ads

Now it becomes easier to monetize your mobile apps built with Flutter as the new stable supports google ads of five different formats. For example, banner, interstitial, native ads, rewarded video. Moreover, the Google Mobile Ads SDK for Flutter also lets you integrate with both AdMob and Ad Manager Support to help you optimize ad performance. 

Get complete information about monetization on flutter.dev.

Firebase and FlutterFire

Firebase and FlutterFire 

There are a couple of updates associated with this release for FlutterFire users. Let’s check out what features it adds which intend to simplify application development with Flutter and Firebase. 

  • All FlutterFire plugins are graduating from beta to stable
  • New support in DartPad for several Firebase services
  • Up-to-date libraries to more easily build UI for authentication and live Firestore queries
  • New Firestore Object/Document Mapping for Flutter, available in Alpha

Another significant update includes the ascension of all FlutterFire plugins from beta to stable. Major plugins that move to stable and ready for production use for iOS, Android, and web are Analytics, Dynamic Links, Performance Monitoring, Realtime DatabaseIn-App Messaging, Remote Config, and the new kid on the block, Installations

Lastly, on the cord of Firebase, you will see new support in DartPad for many Firebase Services, live Firestore query UI, new libraries for authentication, and a new alpha version of Firestore Object/Document Mapping for Flutter.

Desktop Support Now One More Step Up

On the road to the stable release for desktop app development, Flutter 2.8 release has leaped forward to improve areas such as internationalization and localization support, improved support for visual density, Windows accessibility integration, and more.

Dart 2.15

Dart 2.15 With Cool New Features

The Flutter 2.8 release has not come alone. Its programming language has also been brought to Dart 2.15 with some performance boost. For example; 

  • Significant performance improvements on concurrency;
  • Dart has constructor tear-offs now that will come in handy while developing Flutter UI;
  • Added support for compressed pointers that result in memory reduction,
  • Dart SDK now has DevTools suits of debugging and performance tools;
  • New pub features,
    • One security feature for package publishers that detects if a publisher accidentally publishes secrets,
    • Another feature is to support retracting a package version that’s already been published.

Get the complete report on Dart 2.15’s new features and improvements.

So Much More Is Yet To Come.

While making the last release of the year remarkable, Flutter has got a whole new branch coming out, i.e., Flame 1.0, a modular 2D game engine built with Flutter. “It takes advantage of the powerful infrastructure provided by Flutter but simplifies the code you need to build your projects” — Flame Doc reads. 

Open-source Flutter itself is more performant, and all improvements and cutting-edge features coming out with releases make it more appealing. After this release note, however, there are lots and lots of reasons to upgrade to Flutter 2.8. Business people must hurry to hire Flutter developers as their demand touches an all-time high with every release.

Assuming you enjoyed these highlights, let’s say au revoir until the next update.

Sagar Bagsariya

Sagar Bagasariya is a Flutter expert and technical team leader with a proven knack for designing and developing efficient, high-performing, user-friendly mobile applications.

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