FLUTTER FRAMEWORK

 

The first version of Flutter was known as "Sky" and ran on the Android operating system. It was unveiled at the 2015 Dart developer summit with the stated intent of being able to render consistently at 120 frames per second. During the keynote of Google Developer Days in Shanghai in September 2018, Google announced Flutter Release Preview 2, the last major release before Flutter 1.0. On December 4th of that year, Flutter 1.0 was released at the Flutter Live event, denoting the first stable version of the framework. On December 11, 2019, Flutter 1.12 was released at the Flutter Interactive event.

On May 6, 2020, the Dart software development kit (SDK) version 2.8 and Flutter 1.17.0 were released, adding support for the Metal API which improves performance on iOS devices by approximately 50%, as well as new Material widgets and network tracking development tools

Flutter engine

Flutter's engine, written primarily in C++, provides low-level rendering support using either Google's Skia graphics library or the custom "Impeller" graphics layer Additionally, it interfaces with platform-specific SDKs such as those provided by Android and iOS to implement accessibility, file and network I/O, native plugin support, and more.

Design-specific widgets

The Flutter framework contains two sets of widgets that conform to specific design languages: Material Design widgets implement Google's design language of the same name, and Cupertino widgets implement Apple's iOS Human interface guidelines. Flutter allows the developer to use either set of widgets on either platform, i.e. even Cupertino widgets on Android. Third party packages can be used to automatically adjust the app's design to the current operating system.