Do you know Flutter is officially the most popular cross-platform development framework used across the globe? And Statista confirms the fact that Flutter has surpassed React Native by 4%. This data does not surprise me as the Flutter team has gone through extensive planning to set goals and objectives for 2023.

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Recently, the Flutter team announced that as an open-source project, Flutter will continue to focus on making strategic plans with better transparency & clarity. For the same, they have come up with some guiding principles to invest in improving the future direction for 2023.

Today, I am here to talk about whether flutter is worth learning in 2023 and what the Flutter team has decided to go ahead with and plan a roadmap for flutter. But before we get into those, let me give you an overview of Flutter updates in 2023.

The Current State of Flutter in 2023

The cross-platform development industry has seen massive growth after the release of the Flutter framework. Before that, developers were hampered by sub-quality tools that made iterative development hard and pushed them to trade off productivity with quality.

Contrary to that, Flutter is believed to be the better alternative as it’s fast and productive. Flutter's popularity is increasing as technology is upgrading, it has a beautiful UI development kit to create varied app experiences. 

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The same is reflected in the market share report shared earlier where Flutter not only overthrew React Native as a popular toolkit for cross-platform development but is also used for developing nearly 500,000 apps. However, the team is not going to rest here as they plan to build the most popular UI toolkit with top-notch quality & productivity.

For the same, they are ready to extend the flutter version in other development areas to become a portable framework. They will emphasize not only mobile development but also web and desktop. The team has a defined strategy and objective to grow the monthly active users. Let’s see how they plan to do so:

Flutter’s Strategic Plan & Roadmap Ahead

Here are some details on the roadmap for flutter in 2023:

1. Developer Experience

Flutter is based on Dart so, working with it is not mandatory for developers but a voluntary choice. For instance, Swift & Kotlin are the default solutions to work with iOS and Android respectively.

Programmers can choose to work with Flutter only if they want to, and that too when the experience of using it is above average, which isn’t provided by default systems. The team is focused on establishing developer experience as a fundamental value that gives them an edge over others.

Here’s how Flutter plans to improve the developer experience:

• Increasing the level of abstraction to benefit developers from others' work. For instance, developers can save their effort for Authentication implementation by using Firebase Auth Sign-in Widget instead of doing it from scratch.
• Global selection is now updated in the flutter framework which helps you to have a selection of any ‘selection area’ widgets.
• The trackpad input feature provides richer and smoother control and it also reduces misinterpretation in certain cases.
• Introducing new DevTool features to debug performance issues and find places where Flutter fails
• The team will focus on many other areas such as building plugins, widgets, and libraries to solve common issues to improve the developer experience.

2. Quality Support to Multiple Platforms

With slow but steady improvement, Flutter will introduce high-quality support for multiple platforms such as desktop (Windows, macOS, and Linux), web, and mobile. They have a plan in motion to leverage the popularity of web development.

This is because the team has realized the potential growth millions of developers of web & desktop can bring in. However, this does not mean they have scraped the plans for mobile growth. They still want to invest in growing the mobile developer base, which is large and growing fast.

Let’s see how their plans can come to fruition:

Flutter for Desktop in 2023

There’s a significant growth opportunity for Flutter for desktops in 2023. As we know flutter not only supports windows it also works for macOS and Linux (supported by Linux time tracker) snap stores.

The desktop versions of flutter give you a native-complied performance without large browser engine dependencies. Flutter also provides access to the underlying Win32, Cocoa, or Unix platform APIs. 

As promised back in 2019 and after seeing the evidence and initial success, the team is all set to make good on their promise and deliver the same quality experience. And contributors like Canonical plan to aid the Flutter team to complete support for Linux and broaden the desktop ecosystem.

Flutter for Web in 2023

In regards to the web, the team offered the first stable release for web support in 2021. However, it’s too early for them to predict the course or the success of the same. Still, the team is adamant about offering greater value than conventional DOM frameworks.

Flutter’s main focus areas in 2023 for web support will include improving accessibility, performance, plugin quality, and consistency across browsers.

3. Flutter Features

Flutter has a hot reload feature which makes it very popular among the developer's community, this feature is practically applicable to app development. 

Flutter offers a wide range of widgets that makes the app development process easier and faster for developers, these widgets are customizable that enable you to create the entire graphical interface.

Flutter has firebase crashlytics where a developer can checkout for errors and crashes in real-time. firebase is a backend service for flutter developers, it provides them with hosted backend services such as crash reporting, cloud storage, and more.

Google has also introduced the casual games toolkit, which will permit developers to create and launch casual games from scratch.

Flutter has a Webapp Lifecycle which provides a new lifecycle API for web applications that will provide developers with more flexibility and control over the bootstrap process of the flutter app.

Flutter has an amazing tool that allows you to build mobile apps without writing any code. FlutterFlow offers a simple drag-and-drop interface which makes developing all sorts of apps for android and IOS simple.

Gathering data and creating a chart is nowadays common in mobile apps, so flutter gives you the FI_chart package that provides widgets for creating highly customizable lines, bar, pie, and radar charts.

4. Framework, Engine, and Language Improvements

Flutter plans to improve fidelity across platforms and bring Material 3 support. They intend to implement a cross-text selection widget to achieve higher fidelity for the web and other platforms.

Further, Dart will continue to have innovation in 2023 as the team plans to introduce a major upgrade that can include static metaprogramming.

It has introduced the objective-C and swift interop page, which helps users know how to use Dart packages to call APIs from those languages. 

It’ll include some minor fixes such as improving import syntax for packages, extending the compilation toolchain to support compiling Wasm, and others.

5. Securing & Strengthening Fundamentals

In addition to doing all of the other things said above, the Flutter team wants to solidify the security fundamentals. This will allow the team to safeguard it against any security vulnerability or other issues. For the same, the team is working hard to build better infrastructure.

However, with increasing demand, it has become hard for Flutter to strengthen its infrastructure. This is because of their plans to include support for web and desktop along with new hardware such as the Apple M1 chip.

Also, there are incidents where other open-source technologies have been compromised. And Flutter’s popularity has risen to a massive level, it’s on the radar. Thus, one of their key areas of focus will be to improve security standards in 2023.

6. 32-bit iOS Support Drop

Flutter has also planned to drop support for 32-bit iOS in 2023. As per Flutter’s standard support requirements and report of Apple iOS version usage, support for iOS 9.3.6 would officially move to the “Best Effort” tier. This means that the minimum iOS version in the supported tier would only be iOS 14, which translates to dropping support for 32-bit iOS devices.

Final Words

From the looks of it, the Roadmap of Flutter has planned looks intriguing and exciting at the same time. The only thing that remains is how well and successful they become in executing this strategic roadmap for 2023. They do have plans to invest in scaling their UI toolkit to cover all screen sizes and form factors.

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