A Brief History of Flutter

In 2015 Google unveiled Flutter, a new SDK based on the Dart language, as the next platform for Android development, and in 2017 an alpha version of it (0.0.6) was released to the public for the first time.

At I/O 2017 Google showed off using Flutter and its multi-platform capabilities, and continued promoting it at I/O 2018. Since then, Google has been investing in Flutter and recommending it as the way everyone should be developing mobile apps.

In December 2018 Flutter 1.0 was released and made available so that developers could begin using the SDK to make app creation easier.

At Google I/O 2019, Flutter support for desktop and web platforms was publicly announced. Tools for developing Flutter apps for Windows, macOS, Linux, and the web were released.

In addition to being unstable and untested, desktop development is being held back further by the lack of plugin support, which is very limited mostly because, at the time of writing, plugin tooling is still in the process of being developed, meaning that binaries for the platform-specific code for each platform has to be manually built and linked by editing the Google-provided Makefiles that can be found in Google’s dedicated flutter-desktop-embedding GitHub repository.^[1]

On the other hand, web support is progressing quickly and shouldn’t take much more than a rebuild of a working Flutter mobile project that doesn’t have any native plugins or platform-specific code.