What’s New in Flutter? | August 2024

Even though we’re in the middle of the vacation season, Google and the Flutter community are not idling. At the beginning of August, a new version of this technology was released that optimizes software developers’ work even more.

What’s new in the Flutter 3.24? Get to know the most important changes.

More possibilities with DevTools

• In the latest Flutter version, there’s a Rebuild Stats feature that enables you to check if you don’t build widgets too often, for example, in the animation.
• All the DevTools are available in IDE. New improvements facilitate using them in Visual Studio Code. All you need is the latest VS Code version and Flutter and Dart extensions.

Easier to build apps for Apple systems

• The new version supports Swift Package Manager, which should facilitate access to the whole Swift packages ecosystem and facilitate the installation of Flutter on Apple systems. This support is currently at the initial stage.
• CupertinoActionSheet enables you to make Flutter apps even more similar to native ones.

Support for video ads

• If you plan on embedding video materials in your app, you can now easily precede them with short ads. You only need a new plugin: Interactive Media Ads (IMA). When the ad ends, users are able to watch your video material.
• An option to embed ads also in the middle of a video will be available in the future.

Better graphics and animations

• With Flutter GPU, you can create custom renderers without native code. Dart and GLSL shaders are enough. As a result, you can render complex graphics and even 3D animations directly in Flutter. This way, you get more chances of creating smooth passages between frames. There’s a condition, though. You need the Impeller rendering backend.
• New slivers were added: PinnedHeaderSliver and SliverResizingHeader. You can combine them with already existing slivers, allowing you to differentiate how scrollable widgets behave and look.

New widgets

• In the two_dimensional_scrollables package, there’s a widget called TreeView for creating trees that can be scrolled in various directions.
• The new CarouselView widget for carousels in Material Design is a scrollable list. Its first and last elements can change their size depending on whether they are scrolled to the inside of the view or the outside.
• Are you planning on collecting feedback? TheFeedback widget will let you quickly get it in the audio and haptic form. The information will be sent as a response to a specific gesture.
• Do you want to implement forms or quizzes? Use ToggleableStateMixin and ToggleablePainter classes to create elements such as checkboxes or toggles.

Building views faster in web apps

If you develop not only mobile but also web apps, the new Flutter version offers an option to render the content simultaneously to many HTML elements. This allows you to embed views created with Flutter in apps built using another technology.

We encourage you to test new options and wish you success!