Google intros mobile UI framework Flutter

Google on Tuesday announced the beta release of Flutter, a new mobile UI framework that aims to help developers build native app interfaces for both iOS and Android. The toolkit basically serves as a middleware layer that lets developers extend an app's reach to multiple platforms.

According to a Google blog post, Flutter "targets the sweet spot of mobile development: performance and platform integrations of native mobile, with high-velocity development and multi-platform reach of portable UI toolkits."

Google touts a series of benefits to using Flutter for mobile app development:

• High-velocity development with features like stateful Hot Reload, a new reactive framework, rich widget set, and integrated tooling.
• Expressive and flexible designs with composable widget sets, rich animation libraries, and a layered, extensible architecture.
• High-quality experiences across devices and platforms with portable, GPU-accelerated renderer and high-performance, native ARM code runtime, and platform interop.

Google said Flutter is not yet ready for a stable release, but that the framework has been used in production apps with millions of installs.

"Since our alpha release last year, we delivered, with help from our community, features such as screen reader support and other accessibility features, right-to-left text, localization and internationalization, iPhone X and iOS 11 support, inline video, additional image format support, running Flutter code in the background, and much more," Google wrote in a blog post.

Google plans continue improving stabilization of the framework and scenario completion, with new betas expected to roll out every four weeks.

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