Flutter 1.17 marks the first major stable release of Flutter to ship this year (2020), and it’s also the first version to adopt the new versioning scheme.

Bug Fixes

As expected, this release includes the usual round of bug fixes—closing a total of 6,339 issues since version 1.12, the previous stable release. Notable improvements include fixes related to accessibility and internationalization.

Performance and Size Improvements

Simply upgrading to Flutter 1.17 gives you better performance at no extra cost. The main gains come from reduced CPU/GPU and memory usage. But that’s not all—this release also shrinks your app’s bundle size. On iOS, Flutter now leverages Metal, Apple’s API for direct GPU access, so all devices that support Metal benefit fully.

New Widget: NavigationRail

The navigation rail is a beta component in Material Design that serves as a side navigation pane—unlike the standard navigation bar, which sits at the top or bottom. You can learn more about navigation rails at material.io.

Other widgets have also been updated to align with the latest Material guidelines. For more details, check out the original announcement.

Text Scale

Material Design has updated its guidelines around text scaling, primarily refining the naming conventions for different scale levels to make them more intuitive. You can find more details in the original announcement.

To upgrade your Flutter version via the terminal, run:

flutter upgrade

For the full details, read the original announcement by the Flutter team on Medium.

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