FLUTTER

Flutter is Google’s open source toolkit for helping developers build iOS and Android apps. It’s not necessarily a household name yet, but it’s also less than a year old and, to some degree, it’s going up against frameworks like Facebook’s popular React Native. Google’s framework, which is heavily focused around the company’s Dart programming language, was first announced at Google’s I/O developer conference last year.

As the company announced today, Flutter is now officially in beta and a number of developers have already used it to build and publish apps that have hit top spots in both the Google Play and Apple App Store.

Seth Ladd, Google’s product manager for Flutter, told me that it’s no surprise that the company is making this announcement during MWC. The company wants to use this opportunity to engage with mobile developers and to highlight the advances it made over the course of the last year. For the most part, that means better tooling, like support for Android Studio and Visual Studio Code for writing Flutter apps.