Flutter 2023 roadmap
published on 2023/01/26
Research
A lot of developers have expressed an interest in creating applications that integrate closely with the look and feel of their target platform, while supporting multiple platforms, without having to reimplement their interface multiple times. We want to study whether some form of adaptive layout would be able to address these needs, starting with Android vs iOS.
With our new graphics backend comes the opportunity for new features, and one in particular that we are interested in studying more closely is the integration of 3D into Flutter scenes. We expect to begin experiments with 3D this year. Similarly, we believe our new graphics backend may enable improvements to the low-level dart:ui API, and new shader features.
Relatedly, we are investigating implementing wide color gamut support (probably starting with iOS), as it is a highly requested feature.
We are also actively investigating migrating from ICU4C to ICU4X (the new Rust-based ICU backend), which will require research into how to embed Rust into our build pipeline across all our platforms, how to share Rust code between our engine and Dart FFI packages, and how to perform tree-shaking for binary code used in such packages.
Finally, we expect to spend some time investigating how to update Flutter to take advantage of new features coming from Dart this year, such as updating our APIs to make use of records and patterns, updating our toolchain to support RISC-V, or making use of new FFI features for plugins.