Google LLC’s said today it’s forging a partnership with Canonical Ltd.’s Ubuntu Desktop team to support applications built using its Flutter framework on Linux-based computer systems.

Flutter is a software framework that’s used by developers to build “native” apps on multiple operating systems, including Android, iOS, Windows and MacOS. The idea is that they can write their apps just once using Google’s Dart programming language and have them run perfectly across all of those platforms, without needing to tinker with the code for each version.

The framework is designed to enable what Google calls “ambient computing.” That’s where people can access their favorite apps and services from any location, be it at home or at work, on any kind of device, using a consistent set of methods and commands.

The partnership with Canonical means that developers who use the Flutter framework can now deploy their apps on the Snap store and other kinds of Linux app stores, said Chris Sells, a senior product manager at Google, and Ken VanDine, an engineering manager at Canonical.

“It has long been our vision for Flutter to power platforms,” Sells and VanDine wrote in a blog post. “Today we are happy to jointly announce the availability of the Linux alpha for Flutter alongside Canonical, the publisher of Ubuntu, the world’s most popular desktop Linux distribution.”

The announcement helps Google to further its planned expansion of Flutter to various desktop environments. Although Flutter has always been envisaged as a portable framework for building application interfaces on any kind of platform, the initial focus was on mobile platforms such as Android and iOS. More recently, Google has expanded Flutter to support popular desktop operating systems such as Windows and MacOS, and now, Linux operating systems too.

Sells and VanDine said Canonical wanted to be at the vanguard of Flutter’s native, cross-platform story for several reasons, including its fast-growing ecosystem of developers, its multiplatform support and its rich development platform that uses Visual Studio Code, Android Studio and IntelliJ.

“By making Linux a first class Flutter platform, Canonical is inviting application developers to publish their apps to millions of Linux users and broaden the availability of high quality applications available to them,” Sells and VanDine said.

Image: Google