Google LLC is serving up more treats for developers with a bevy of updates to its open-source Flutter software for building rich user interfaces for both Android and iOS apps using the same code.

Specifically, what Flutter does is enable developers to build “native” mobile apps for both mobile operating systems faster than they can with traditional platforms.

The updates, which got a lot of cheers when they were announced today at Google’s I/O developer conference in Mountain View, California, mean that Flutter in fact becomes a multiplatform UI framework. It now supports all manner of desktop, mobile, web and embedded devices as part of Google’s plan to make it “the best framework for developing beautiful experiences on any screen.”

Flutter debuted at I/O in 2017 before the launch of version 1.0 in December last year. It’s an alternative to frameworks such as Facebook Inc.’s React Native, and its apps are built using Google’s Dart programming language.

Flutter has gained notable traction since its release. Major companies, including eBay Inc., Sonos Inc., Capital One Financial Corp., Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. and Tencent Holding, are already building apps with Flutter, Google said. Meanwhile, a recent LinkedIn study showed Flutter is the single fastest-growing skill among software engineers, based on site members claiming it on their profile over the last 12 months.

Multiplatform expansion

With its rising popularity, Google’s Flutter team said in a blog post that its focus over the past year has been on broadening the platform’s reach. “This was triggered both by internal teams within Google who are increasingly relying on Flutter, as well as the latent potential of the Dart platform for delivering portable experiences,” Google’s team said.

One of the results of that work is a technical preview of Flutter for Web, which enables web-based apps to be built using the same framework. Google says Flutter for Web can be used to create “highly interactive, graphically rich content,” though it plans to continue evolving this version with a “focus on performance and harmonizing the codebase.” The idea with the technical preview is to get early adopters to try it out and provide more feedback.

Google offered an early example of what can be built using Flutter for Web, teaming up with the New York Times to build a small puzzle game called Kenken that uses the same code across Android, iOS, the web and Chrome OS.

Flutter for Desktop, meanwhile, is a little less advanced at this stage. There’s no technical preview available yet, but Google today published instructions on how to use it to build apps for Linux, Mac and Windows.

Google also offers Flutter for embedded devices. Today it published samples of how to get it up and running on small devices such as Raspberry Pi. The company also announced an embedded application programming interface for Flutter that enables it to be used in scenarios such as home and automotive. Flutter for embedded devices has already been used by Google to power some of the features on its new Nest Hub Max devic.

Lastly, Google announced a more general update for Flutter on mobile. Flutter 1.5 comes with updates to its iOS and Material widgets, engine support for new mobile devices types, and Dart 2.3, which comes with new UI-as-a-code features.

Android Jetpack gets a boost

In related news, Google said its also expanding Android Jetpack, which is a set of software components for Android app developers. With Jetpack, developers’ lives are made easier as it frees them from writing boilerplate code and also handles many other complex tasks, which may help explain why it’s used in more than 80% of the top 1,000 Android apps.

Google said it’s making six new Jetpack libraries available in alpha and five in beta. These include CameraX, which is a library that should make it easier to develop apps that use smartphone cameras. There’s also Jetpack Compose, which combines the Kotlin language with a reactive programming model to simplify user interface development.

Analyst Holger Mueller of Constellation Research Inc. said today’s announcements fit well with one another because there’s too much software to be built for the number of developers out there. Therefore Flutter’s addition of web, desktop and embedded development should be welcomed, he said.

“Next to the platforms, it’s also important to make it faster to build software with high value-add components, and that’s what JetPack does,” Mueller said. “And then there are the productivity aspects of programming languages themselves, and Kotlin addresses that. So Google is working on three fronts to make developers more productive to help them accelerate their enterprise through software.”

Image: Google