This year’s Google IO is behind us. Google introduces us to a lot of new things. Among all of the informations, there is some great news for Flutter. What’s this? Let’s check!

Flutter for Web

The biggest news for Flutter developers is Flutter Web announcement. Back in December on Flutter Live, we’ve heard about the plans for incoming 2019 year. One of those plans was to support building websites with Flutter. Now, this week, Google has released a preview version of Flutter for the web! By the way, it’s not called Hummingbird anymore, now it’s called Flutter web.

Flutter Web supports popular browsers — Chrome, Firefox, and Safari. For now, there’s no support for plugins system yet, so you can’t port your application without mocking part of it, but Flutter team is constantly making changes and improvements, so it’ll be possible any day soon. And I encourage you to give it a try, you can build beautiful UI for web exactly as you’ll build it for mobile app:

Flutter for web demo running on Chrome, Firefox, and Safari. Source: https://medium.com/flutter-io/bringing-flutter-to-the-web-904de05f0df0

You can read more about Flutter for web on the new website.

Flutter 1.5

Another huge announcement is a new version of Flutter: 1.5! With this new version came a lot of improvements, including In-App purchase plugin (this issue had over a hundred reactions!), support for iOS widgets translations and updates for new App Store requirements.

Also, worth noticing is support for Dart 2.3 with UI-as-code feature, which allows us to build UI with code in a more efficient way. For example:

You can more about Flutter 1.5 here.

Flutter ML Kit

Another great announcement is the new project — ML Kit Custom Image Classifier. It’s an app (made of course in Flutter!) for creating custom image classification models. In this app, you can create your own dataset for machine learning. The app is made using Firebase and allows you to do the whole process — from creating your database, through updating it with the new data (you can invite friends to help you!), ending with training and testing your models on your device.

Flutter for desktop

Although Flutter for desktop is not something production-ready, the Flutter team published an early version of instructions for creating Flutter apps for desktops. It may be a great point to start playing with Flutter desktop and we’re keeping our fingers crossed for this to be ready soon.

Summary

Google IO has brought us a lot of news. As far as we can see, Flutter team puts a lot of effort into making Flutter beyond mobile by creating the ability to develop apps to the web and desktop.

By studying Flutter 2019 roadmap I can say it’ll be a very interesting year for the Flutter. I’m really excited about being part of it 🙌

You can read the whole announcement on GoogleDevelopers blog.