Google I/O 2024: Flutter Moving Forward

The dust has settled on Google I/O 2024, and the future of Flutter is looking bright! As expected, AI remained a central theme, with exciting announcements across various Google products. But for Flutter developers, the real stars of the show were the advancements in the Flutter framework itself. Read on for major Flutter updates from Google I/O!

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Flutter development ecosystem gets an upgrade

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Google’s app development ecosystem saw some big advancements at I/O this year. Notably, Flutter 3.22 and Dart 3.4 launched just in time for I/O, and were highlighted during the Developer Keynote.  

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Flutter 3.22 and Dart 3.4, bring us closer to building beautiful and performant apps across platforms. The main highlight of which is stable support for compiling Flutter web apps to WebAssembly. This translates to a significant boost in performance, with benchmarks showing example apps compiled to WebAssembly achieving 2x to 3x faster speeds compared to the previous JavaScript implementation. Some of the other updates:

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• Faster and smoother: The improved Impeller rendering engine delivers smoother visuals and reduces CPU usage on iOS devices.
• Enhanced navigation: Leverage Android's predictive back gesture for a more natural user experience.
• Monetization made easy: Integrate the Google Mobile Ads SDK for new ways to earn revenue from your app.
• Powerful debugging: A new deep link validator in DevTools helps you identify and fix linking issues.
• Simplified Dart upgrades: Streamlined API migration with dart fix directly in your IDE makes upgrading Dart code a breeze.
• Advanced profiling: New DevTools capabilities provide deeper insights into your app's performance.
• AI integration: Preview the Vertex AI for Firebase Dart SDK and add powerful AI features to your app, all with robust security.

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A Focus on Developer Experience

These updates go beyond raw performance improvements. They demonstrate Google's commitment to streamlining the development process and empowering Flutter developers. Features like simplified Dart upgrades and advanced profiling tools all contribute to a more efficient and productive development workflow.

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As Flutter continues to evolve, the possibilities for experimentation, innovation, and achieving new heights are more exciting than ever. Watch the full flutter update here!

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The Future of Flutter

With the advancements unveiled at I/O, Flutter is poised to become an even more compelling choice for cross-platform app development.  The combination of performance gains, a developer-centric approach, and the power of AI integration opens up a world of possibilities for experimentation and innovation.  Whether you're building the next big social app or a niche productivity tool, Flutter equips you with the tools to create exceptional experiences that reach users on all major platforms.

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VGV at I/O

At VGV, we were thrilled to have several team members attend Google I/O 2024. They actively participated in sessions, networked with other developers, and gained valuable insights into the future of technology.

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Fresh from the energy of Google IO, Jaime Santiago, one of our Engineering Leads, is back to share his highlights and key takeaways! 

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“Going to Google IO was a great experience, I love meeting people from the community in person and putting a face to those GitHub and Twitter usernames.

In the keynote I found some cool stuff announced, like the scientific advancements that AlphaFold 3 can bring to the world by understanding how proteins interact with other molecules and helping curing diseases. I think that fine-tuned AI for scientific discoveries is one of the best use cases for this technology, and seeing Google investing in it is great! But not everything is about science, the demo around the Music AI Sandbox was so cool. The fact that you can have an assistant making the sounds that you can describe with words is mind-blowing, this helps artists be more creative and explore different sounds easier to create music.

For developers, the long context window with Gemini 1.5 Pro is certainly promising. Having the ability to give the model this vast amount of data and making specific questions about it, can help us developers be more productive, write better documentation and solve more difficult problems.

But the session that was the most interesting to me, with concrete examples that you can start using today, was the talk about Building generative AI agents with Vertex AI Agent Builder and Flutter. I find the idea about building a custom AI agent that accesses different, customized APIs is very powerful. On one side, you have the control over the information sources that the model will have, but on the other side, you leverage the power and autonomy of AI to orchestrate the information and provide it in an understandable way.”

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We're particularly excited about how these advancements can be applied to our client projects, allowing us to craft even more innovative and efficient solutions. Stay tuned for future blog posts where we'll dive deeper into specific Flutter updates and how they can benefit your app development journey.

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