Starting 2024 strong with Flutter and Dart
An introduction, two new SDK releases, and bringing Flutter and Dart into the Gemini era
We’re excited to announce the first of this year’s quarterly SDK releases for Flutter and Dart — Flutter 3.19 and Dart 3.3, along with some exciting announcements involving AI.
Flutter and Dart’s value and future
I recently joined the Flutter and Dart team, and am excited to work with our developer community at a time when AI is moving quickly to enhance developer productivity and unlock new types of user experiences. I see endless potential in Flutter and Dart’s role in helping to shape this future. I’m equally inspired by the original vision for Flutter to improve the experience of building beautiful, performant, multi platform apps for any device.
Judging by the millions of talented and creative developers who support Flutter with contributions to the framework, or by building amazing experiences — it’s clear others see this vision and are motivated to help. And the core mission remains the same: to deliver a strong language and framework pairing, enabling creative developers to build beautiful, rich, and performant apps for any device. Let’s do this together!
Bringing Flutter and Dart into the Gemini era
Today we launched the Google AI Dart SDK, a new pub.dev package, google_generative_ai, and supporting resources; together these enable you to build your own generative AI-based features like smart chat bots, visual search engines, and image descriptions into Dart and Flutter apps using the Gemini API. Flutter and Dart’s cross-platform capabilities and this new SDK make it easier for you to build interactive experiences across platforms.
And this is only the beginning of the innovations that we’re bringing to Flutter and Dart development with AI. For instance, soon Flutter and Dart developers can copy Dart code directly from Google’s AI Studio after honing prompts for your use case.
Learn more about the Google AI Dart SDK in the deep dive blog post.
Many developers have already begun to bring Flutter and AI tools together in exciting ways:
- The team at LeanCode have used the Gemini model to build arb_translate, a package that allows developers to perform translation tasks automatically
- We Spot Turtles! have combined Flutter and AI in their mission to save sea turtles from extinction. They were recently featured in Google Play’s #WeArePlay campaign. Take a look below.
- AutoGPT, an experimental, open-source project that builds on top of large language models (LLMs), has a Flutter client that runs across iOS, Android, web, macOS, and Windows.
#WeArePlay | Caitlin and Nicolas | We Spot Turtles! | Australia
As you explore the Gemini model’s capabilities, be sure to share the new and innovate experiences you’re building with us using the #BuildWithGemini hashtag.
Two new SDK releases
Aside from the excitement that AI brings, we remain focused on continuing to build a strong UI framework, capable of delivering any experience you want to build on any screen you want to build for. You’ll see progress towards that vision in today’s SDK releases, Flutter 3.19 and Dart 3.3.
These releases are focused on refinements and performance improvements that build upon the trajectory that Flutter and Dart set out last year. In this Flutter release, you’ll find:
- Updates to our work to generate breakthrough graphics performance through our continued work on Impeller
- Additional steps towards providing seamless integration between platforms with Flutter iOS native fonts and an early version of a deep linking web validator
- Continued focus on the developer experience with updates to DevTools and a progress report on the Flutter package ecosystem
- And finally, we’re excited to share progress on our mission to help define the future of the web with Wasm
Dart 3.3 in turn, introduces extension types, a new model for interacting with JavaScript on the web, and updates to our work to support access to more and better web libraries. You can learn more about each release in the blog posts for Flutter 3.19 and Dart 3.3, respectively.
2024 Strategy and Roadmap
Each of these features is a small step in a larger journey we’re taking this year, and that you can see in our 2024 roadmap. As always, these roadmaps are born from a desire to be open about our plans as we know many of you consider Flutter and Dart to be essential components in your careers and businesses. That being said, progress can be difficult to predict, even with a plan in place.
And while we’ll do our best to continue to remain transparent as changes inevitably force us to shift focus and make tradeoffs, we want to highlight that there are more contributors to Flutter and Dart outside of Google than those of us employed here, meaning that the things mentioned in our roadmap are but a small portion of the thousands of changes that will come to Dart and Flutter this year.
Bringing it all together
I’ve worked on many fun and innovative projects during my 17+ years at Google and YouTube, but this is the most enthusiastic I’ve felt about leaning into a new opportunity. I started my career as a software engineer, and my first job at Google was as the PM for the Maps API and Geo developer tools, so it’s great to get back to my developer roots.
Part of what drives my enthusiasm is, well, your enthusiasm. Just in 2024 so far, I’ve seen such amazing things come out of this community, including:
- Over 2,700 of you have joined our Global Gamers Challenge, which we’re hosting in partnership with international advocacy firm Global Citizen to challenge you to use your skills to build Flutter games that inspire the world to live more sustainably.
- Superlist, who announced version 1.0 yesterday, is using Flutter to redefine task management, note taking, and everything in between.
In closing, my kids are starting to study Computer Science, and I’m motivated to help create the software development experience that will help the next generation change the world for the better.
This year promises to be an important one for creating that future, and I can’t wait to see the ways in which Flutter and Dart support it. As always, we’re incredibly grateful for your continued support and we can’t wait to see what we’ll build together. Until next time!
