Google LLC today rolled out a new stable release of its Flutter development tool that adds support for iOS 14, the latest version of Apple Inc.’s smartphone operating system, and includes several Android-focused upgrades as well.

Flutter is a popular open-source framework for building user interfaces. More than 100,000 apps use it in the Android ecosystem alone, and lately Google has been expanding the number of platforms on which the framework can be deployed.

Today’s update focuses exclusively on iOS and Android, the operating systems on which Flutter currently has the most widespread adoption.

The iOS enhancements are headlined by the newly added iOS 14 compatibility. Developers will have to rebuild their apps using Flutter version 1.22, as today’s update is officially called, to ensure full support for the operating system. They can now also use Flutter with App Clips, a feature introduced in iOS 14 that allows iPhone owners to try out apps without downloading them.

“Whenever a new version of a mobile OS is announced, we test it thoroughly looking for incompatibilities or changes that affect Flutter and its tools,” detailed Google senior product manager Chris Sells. “In the case of iOS 14, we made quite a few changes to Flutter to ensure that it works the way developers want it to.”

Apple isn’t the only major mobile industry player that updated its operating system recently. Google last month announced the general availability of Android 11, which Flutter now supports as well.

The platform compatibility is joined by more targeted enhancements focused on improving specific parts of the user experience. Google has released widgets that enable developers to display web pages and Google Maps content inside their Flutter-based apps. The widgets are joined by smooth scrolling, which improves visuals on devices with screens that render graphics at a pace slower than the maximum supported scroll speed. 

A separate enhancement in the new Flutter update focuses on multitasking support. When the user has background apps open, Android sometimes closes some or all of them to free up computing resources for the service that is currently being actively used. A new experimental feature dubbed State Restoration will allow Flutter-based apps to restore their previous saved state quickly if they’re closed by the operating system and then relaunched by the user.

“While we’re happy to put this preview version of State Restoration in your hands, there’s more work to do,” Google’s Chris Sells noted. “Where your user is in the app will not be restored. That will be coming to a beta soon and to the next stable release of Flutter.” Sells also hinted the feature could eventually arrive to iOS as well. 

Photo: Google