Google has announced that Flutter, its open source mobile UI framework for crafting native interfaces on iOS and Android, will now support Windows as a target operating system. 

Google says it makes sense to support Windows as Google's own statistics show that over half of all Flutter developers use Windows. A preview version appeared over the summer, and this has now been released as the official Windows alpha.

Until now Flutter has been available for Android and iOS, with over 100,000 apps written in Flutter shipped to the Google Play Store. Google plans to add versions supporting MacOS, Linux and the Web in the future.

Flutter is essentially a combination of Google's Dart programming language and a runtime environment that is referred to as an app engine in Flutter. Dart is a C-type, block-structured language with objects that Google developed but that failed to achieve support in browsers other than Google Chrome. Flutter's runtime environment enables apps created in it to run outside browsers, and the runtime environment for Android and iOS creates apps that are close to  native.While Dart failed to achieve widespread support, Flutter has become very popular.

The move to supporting desktop devices means Flutter now has to support keyboards, mice, mouse wheels and controllers on the input side, along with working well with larger screen sizes. It also means Flutter will support plugins, mixtures of Dart code and native code for each of the platforms that the plugin supports.

There are already some plugins for Windows that have been developed by the Flutter community, including a URL launcher that will launch URLs in the browser from your app; a path finder that will find the path to special directions on the user’s machine like Documents or temp; barometrically encrypted storage; and a plugin to play audio from your desktop apps

The Flutter developers say:

"This alpha release offers a solid foundation that we’ll stabilize over the coming months. With support for Windows 7 and above, we hope this gives adventurous developers something to get started with."

More Information

Flutter Website

Related Articles

Flutter Takes Off

Flutter 1.17 Released

LinkedIn Claims Flutter is Fastest Growing Skill For Software Engineers

All A Flutter - Google's Cross Platform App Framework Ready To Go

Google's Dart Reborn As Cross Platform App Language

To be informed about new articles on I Programmer, sign up for our weekly newsletter, subscribe to the RSS feed and follow us on Twitter, Facebook or Linkedin.

Comments

Make a Comment or View Existing Comments Using Disqus

or email your comment to: comments@i-programmer.info