Flutter 1.17 and Dart 2.8
Perhaps the biggest news so far with this slew of announcements was the release of Flutter 1.17, including Dart 2.8. Flutter 1.17 offers performance and memory improvements on all platforms, but you’ll see the biggest boosts on iOS, with the adoption of Apple’s Metal subsystem for graphics rendering. For Android too, you’ll see improvements, particularly with the new optional fast start debugging mode, which offers a 3x speed boost with no changes to your code.
Beyond the new features mentioned in the blog post, one feature that some of you have discovered is the updated error display on release mode builds. For release mode builds only, we’ve disabled the “red screen of death” that appears when one of your widgets is incorrectly configured. Many of you told us you’d like to see a less… prominent message in the rare situation that you ship an application with a bug, and hopefully this changed default behavior is a better alternative. (For those of you who want something else, you can use the ErrorWidget.builder property to further customize this.)
It’s exciting to see that, as of the time of writing, two-thirds of you have already upgraded to 1.17. We’d encourage the rest of you to upgrade at your earliest convenience to take advantage of all that we’ve got to offer in this release!
In the intervening period, flutter team shipped one hotfix release for Flutter 1.17, and plan further updates as required to improve stability and quality. You can find out which bug fixes are included in each hotfix release as well as learn how to ensure that you’re running the latest stable version by going to the relevant wiki page.
Plugins and Flutter Favorites
- fl_chart offers beautiful business charts, including line and bar charts, scatter plots, and pie charts.
- flutter_blurhash provides quick placeholders for images that may take time to download.
- font_awesome_flutter offers thousands of icons for easy inclusion in your Flutter app.
- fab_circular_menu provides an attractive popup menu.
- flutter_staggered_animations offers beautiful load animations for listviews, gridviews and columns.
- device_preview constrains your app to a custom device shell, allowing you, for example, to preview an iPhone output from macOS.
- smooth_page_indicator allows you to transition through a carousel of infocards.
- flame provides a small Flutter game engine with a large set of tutorials.
- flutter_launcher_icons is a popular CLI tool which greatly simplifies the task of updating your Flutter app’s launcher icon.
- smooth_star_rating offers a compact control for selecting a star rating.

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