Introduction

This update brings several improvements designed to enhance your development process, user experience, and app performance. Key upgrades include enhancements to Cupertino widgets, Material widgets, and Impeller improvements, which are among the major changes to the engine, framework, and ecosystem. Let’s check out notable and new updates in more detail.

Material Widget Updates

New Page Transition Builder

• New FadeForwardsPageTransitionsBuilder added in the Material 3 (M3) page transition builders. This transition matches Android's latest transition behaviour.
• In this new transition builder, incoming pages slide and fade in from right to left, while outgoing pages slide out simultaneously but fade out similarly.
• This new transition also solves the performance issue previously caused by the ZoomPageTransitionsBuilder transition.

Flutter Engine Updates

• Impeller Valkan Stability Improvement:
  • There are the corrections and the performance improvement on the basis of that flutter 3.27 beta release the fixes they did in the Impeller are the flickering and the visual jitters on the older Vaulkan capable devices.
  • Now they also disable the Android hardware buffer swapchains and this feature is placed behind a featured flag.
  • Also addressed were the black screen and the crashes on the MediaTek and the PowerVR devices caused by disabling Vulkan. These devices now use only Impeller OpenGLES.
  • Android Emulators have been updated to use the Impeller GLES backend for increased stability.

Breaking changes and deprecations

Discontinuing package support

Some flutter packages are planned to be discontinued by April 30th, 2025

• ios_platform_images
• css_colors
• palette_generator
• flutter_image
• flutter_adaptive_scaffold
• flutter_markdown

Removal of script-based application of the Flutter Gradle plugin

The script-based application of the Flutter Gradle plugin, deprecated since version 3.19, has been removed. This change supports transitioning the Flutter Gradle plugin from Groovy to Kotlin and migrating it to use AGP's public API, aiming to reduce breakages and build regressions with new AGP versions. Projects created before 3.16 that haven't migrated will be impacted. If you see the warning "You are applying Flutter’s main Gradle plugin imperatively" during a build, migration is required.

Material normalization

As part of the ongoing theme of normalization in Material, this release deprecates ThemeData.dialogBackgroundColor and replaces it with DialogThemeData.backgroundColor.

In addition, the ButtonStyleButton.iconAlignment property has been deprecated, as it is now part of ButtonStyle and the associated styleFrom methods.

You can use the dart fix command to update your code accordingly.

For all breaking changes in this release, see the full list of migration guidance on the website's breaking changes page.

In summary, these changes are part of Flutter's continued efforts to improve consistency and simplify the framework. These updates help developers maintain code and ensure better long-term compatibility with future versions of Flutter.