Blog Post

What’s New in Flutter 3.27: Lets Explore Impeller, Cupertino Updates, and Exciting Innovations

December 15, 2024 Flutter by Mahedi Hasan

Flutter 3.27 is here, and it’s packed with upgrades that make app development faster, smoother, and more polished. With over 1,400 changes contributed by 187 developers, this release highlights the collaborative spirit of the Flutter community while delivering tools to refine app performance and usability. Let’s dive deeper into what’s new in Flutter 3.27 and how it can elevate your app development journey.

Framework Enhancements: A Better User Experience

Polished Cupertino Widgets for iOS

Flutter’s Cupertino widgets have been upgraded to align closely with iOS design standards, offering a native look and feel for Apple users.

Checkboxes and Radio Buttons: These widgets now feature:
- Better size adjustments for different layouts.
- Customizable properties like semantic labels, cursor styles, and fill colors.
- Deprecated settings replaced with more intuitive options.
Sliding Segmented Control:
- Supports disabling individual segments.
- Improved designs with refined padding, shadows, and segment layouts.
Navigation Bar Transparency:
- The CupertinoNavigationBar now transitions seamlessly from transparent to solid as you scroll.
Modern Button Styles: The CupertinoButton introduces translucent background styles inspired by iOS 15+ with the new sizeStyle and tinted constructors.
Improved Gestures: Widgets like CupertinoPicker and CupertinoDatePicker now recognize tap-slide gestures, making interactions more fluid and intuitive.
Enhanced Performance: Updates to the CupertinoContextMenu, CupertinoMagnifier, and other widgets provide smoother scrolling and better content handling.

Material Design Updates for Consistency

Flutter 3.27 continues its mission to refine Material Design elements for a seamless cross-platform experience:

Standardized Theming: Widgets like CardTheme, DialogTheme, and TabBarTheme now support structured customization for consistent designs.
Dynamic CarouselView: The new CarouselView.weighted feature lets you create flexible layouts (multi-browse, hero, or centered-hero) with the flexWeights parameter, improving user engagement.
Small Yet Powerful Updates:
- SegmentedButton now supports vertical alignment.
- Icon properties in buttons are more customizable, simplifying UI tweaks.
- Fixed bugs like inconsistent button icon sizes and scroll behavior in the AppBar.

Smoother Navigation Transitions

Page transitions are now more seamless, even when routes have different animations. This improvement creates a more natural flow between screens.

Streamlined Row and Column Spacing

The new spacing property lets you specify fixed spacing between child elements in Row and Column widgets, reducing code complexity while achieving a clean layout.

Engine Improvements: Faster, Smoother Rendering

Impeller on Android: High-Performance Rendering

Flutter’s Impeller engine is now the default for modern Android devices, delivering:

Smoother animations and visuals with Vulkan support.
Faster rendering on newer devices, while maintaining Skia as a fallback for older models.

If needed, Impeller can be disabled using the following configuration in your AndroidManifest.xml:

<meta-data
    android:name="io.flutter.embedding.android.EnableImpeller"
    android:value="false" />

iOS Upgrades for Better Performance

Fewer Delays: Eliminates compositor backpressure for smoother frame rendering, especially on high-refresh-rate devices like 120Hz iPhones.
Wide Gamut Colors: Support for DisplayP3 color spaces allows richer, more vibrant visuals that look stunning on modern displays.

DevTools and Debugging: Enhanced Workflow

Exportable Network Data: Save network logs as .har files for easier debugging.
Memory Snapshots: Retain recent memory usage data, even after an app crash.
Flutter Inspector Revamp:
- A condensed widget tree for better readability.
- Inline previews of flex layouts.
- Toggle framework-injected widgets for a cleaner view.

You can also switch to the experimental WebAssembly version of DevTools for better performance.

Web Improvements: Faster and More Accessible

Flutter 3.27 introduces major enhancements for web apps:

Faster Image Loading: Static images in Safari and Firefox now use <img> tags instead of WebAssembly codecs, reducing memory consumption and loading times.
Better Accessibility: Fixed issues with dialogs, headings, password fields, and scrollable elements.
Rendering Fixes: Resolved CanvasKit memory usage problems and clipping errors, ensuring smoother visuals.
Improved Multi-View Mode: Smoother drag scrolling for multi-view web apps.

Platform-Specific Enhancements

iOS Development: Embracing Swift Package Manager

Flutter now integrates with Swift Package Manager (SPM), simplifying dependency management:

No need for Ruby or CocoaPods in future Flutter iOS projects.
Access to the expanding Swift package ecosystem for better plugin development.

While SPM is off by default, it’s already supported in the stable and beta channels. Developers are encouraged to add SPM support to their plugins.

Android Development: Edge-to-Edge and Kotlin Support

Full-Screen Apps: On Android 15+, Flutter apps now default to immersive edge-to-edge layouts.
Kotlin Build Scripts: Flutter now supports Kotlin-based build.gradle.kts files, offering better type safety and modern tooling.

Package Ecosystem: Smarter Management

Pub Workspaces

Flutter now supports Pub Workspaces, allowing developers to manage multiple related packages within a single repository. This reduces IDE memory usage and simplifies project management.

Interactive Media Ads Plugin

The new IMA plugin makes it easy to integrate skippable video ads that comply with VAST standards, ensuring seamless ad playback on both iOS and Android.

Download Analytics on pub.dev

Developers can now track 30-day download trends for their packages on pub.dev. This replaces the outdated popularity score with a more actionable metric.

Breaking Changes

Deep Linking Defaults: Deep linking is now enabled by default, simplifying navigation setup.
Goodbye Objective-C: New iOS projects will no longer support Objective-C as the default language, but existing projects can still use it.
Material Design 3 Updates: New tokens improve aesthetics and hierarchy without compromising accessibility.

Why Upgrade?

Flutter 3.27 is packed with innovations that enhance app performance, design, and debugging. With smoother rendering, better tools, and modernized platforms, this release makes app development faster and more enjoyable.

To explore the updates, simply run:

flutter upgrade

For more insights, visit the official Flutter blog.

Let’s build the future of apps together with Flutter 3.27! 🚀

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