Google has announced version 1.17 of Flutter, its system for creating – in native ARM code – embedded graphic components for both iOS and Android from a single codebase.

Google describes it as a “UI toolkit for building beautiful, natively compiled applications for mobile, web, and desktop from a single codebase”. It says a million developers worldwide are using it.

It’s a bug fix release and represents the first stable release of 2020, following on from the 1.12.13 release at the end of last year.

Chris Sells, Product Manager of Flutter developer experience, writes:

This year has been a challenging one for everyone. Our goal is to ship stable releases on a roughly quarterly cadence; however, this release took a little longer because we’ve been retooling our infrastructure for a new release process. We continue to make quality our #1 priority and believe that the new release model will improve our ability to service the stable branch with quality hotfixes.

This release is full of fixes, with an unprecedented 6,339 issues closed since our 1.12 stable release. A great deal of this increase is due to our partnership with Nevercode, which has given us increased responsiveness when it comes to responding to customer issues.

UI features

For UI support, both Apple’s Cupertino design language (such as sliders and nav bars) and Google’s Material Design concepts (such as textures and user-response cues) can be implemented via Flutter.

No virtual machines or emulation are involved, says the company. Using Skia, the system can paint directly to displays via the graphics subsystem. Video is embeddable as just another widget. The Raspberry Pi is among the platforms capable of supporting the new system.