Flutter Engage, the annual flagship event for Flutter, is just around the corner—bringing updates and plenty of new announcements. This year’s event will be held virtually on March 3, 2021, from 9:30 AM to 1:30 PM PST, which translates to late night March 3rd into early morning March 4th for those in Thailand (00:30–04:30, GMT+7). Admittedly, that’s quite late—or early—for many of us, but there’s no need to worry since a replay will be available. Anyone interested can register for updates at the Flutter Website.
Now’s the perfect time to speculate on what we might see.
Disclaimer: These predictions reflect the author’s personal opinions only and may or may not come to pass.
Flutter for Web Stable
After an extended stay in beta, the moment may finally have arrived for Flutter for Web (formerly known as Project Hummingbird) to reach stable status. The likelihood seems high, with signals coming from GitHub Issues. It will almost certainly be accompanied by real-world production applications already running on it. Personally, I’d wager that one of them will be Rive 2—a tool for developing animations that integrates seamlessly with Flutter. They recently announced version 2, rebuilt entirely with Flutter for Web, boasting both solid performance and a polished UI.
Flutter for Desktop Beta
Hot on its heels is Flutter for Desktop, currently in alpha. The same GitHub Issues gives us reason to predict that Flutter for Desktop will likely move to beta in the near future.
Dart Sound Null-safety (NNBD - Non-Nullable By Default)
Of course, Dart—the language powering Flutter apps—has its own long-awaited release in the pipeline. Sound Null Safety, which was originally expected last year, should finally arrive. It makes code safer by preventing variables from being null unless explicitly declared as such. We can see the groundwork being laid in the preparation articles published on Medium.
FlutterFire
We’ve been watching efforts to improve the Firebase plugin family for quite some time now—a set of services beloved by many developers. Flutter has been contracting external developers to add new features and improve stability for a while. We can expect a clearer roadmap announcement, along with new plugins to support additional Firebase services that are still missing, plus web plugin support to align with Flutter for Web.
Metrics & Roadmap
No keynote would be complete without some eye-popping numbers: Flutter apps on the stores, package and plugin counts on pub.dev, and figures from the Flutter Survey. Beyond that, we should also hear about Flutter’s roadmap for the year ahead—covering the Flutter ecosystem and various performance improvements.
Flutter 2.0.0
With the sheer volume of new features and fixes in the pipeline, it wouldn’t be surprising at all to see Flutter finally break free from its long-running version 1.x and leap to 2.0.
Bonus: Mascot
As for Dash, Flutter’s mascot, the Flutter Engage website has already given us a glimpse of a noticeably cuter redesign, along with fresh looks and styles. That alone would add a fun splash of color to the event.
All of this is pure speculation, of course. To find out what actually gets announced, be sure to tune in to Flutter Engage on March 4th, Thailand time!
📚 Hope you enjoy reading!