Google Announces Advances for Flutter, Android, Web, and Firebase Developers

It’s not just devices and AI: with all eyes on Google I/O this week, the online giant also announced advances for Flutter, Android, Web, and Firebase Developers.

Flutter

Google’s Flutter UI toolkit as been updated to version 3.10 while the Dart programming language advances to version 3. The big updates this time include element embedding in the web version, so that Flutter web apps can be contained in any custom element and not need to take over an entire page; improved design capabilities with new Material 3 widgets; and improved graphics performance. And Dart 3 delivers on null safety, which protects against a whole class of programming bugs.

“With Flutter support on six platforms—Android, iOS, web, Windows, macOS, and Linux—there are over one million published apps using Flutter,” Google’s Time Sneath noted. “They come from all over the world: from SNCF Connect, the train travel app for the French railway; to Apple App of the Day winner SO VEGAN; from the beautiful, newly-redesigned Global Citizen app to the new Ubuntu Linux installer.  We’re so glad to see that Flutter is proving valuable!”

As notable to me, Google’s recently-released Nearby Share app for Windows was also written in Flutter, as was the Google Cloud and Classroom mobile apps and the new Play Console app for Android. It’s nice to see Google using its own frameworks unlike a certain software giant I could name.

Looking ahead, Flutter now supports WebAssembly in pre-release channels, and the WasmGC garbage collection capability for WebAssembly is nearly stable and available as an extension for Chromium-based browsers. WebAssembly should enable dramatic performance improvements in web apps, with Google citing up to 3x gains in execution speeds.

Android

In the Android space, Google has put the next version of its integrated development environment (IDE), Android Studio Giraffe, into the beta channel. And the version coming after that, Android Studio Hedgehog, will feature an AI-powered conversational experience called Studio Bot that Google describes as “a key breakthrough.” It’s available now in Canary. (And you can find both versions here.)

Studio Bot leverages Codey, Google’s foundation model for coding, and it helps you generate code for your app, making you more productive. You can also ask it questions to learn more about Android development or help fix errors in existing code, without having to leave Android Studio.

“Studio Bot is in its very early days,” Google explains, “and we’re training it to become even better at answering your questions and helping you learn best practices. We encourage you to try it out for yourselves, and help it improve by sharing your feedback directly with Studio Bot.”

Android Studio Giraffe also includes a new Android SDK Upgrade Assistant, which helps developers upgrade the API level that an app targets. It’s available in Tools > Android SDK Upgrade Assistant.  And Android Studio Hedgehog will support WearOS 4, the coming Android 13-based version of Google’s wearable platform, via a WearOS 4 Developer Preview emulator. Google has also partnered with Samsung on a new Watch Face format for WearOS 4 that uses declarative XML to build watch faces.

Android developers who use Jetpack Compose UI development framework will see numerous improvements over the current and next two Android Studio releases as well. The current release, Flamingo, includes Compose and Material 3 templates by default, and it supports Material 3 dynamic colors. Android Studio Giraffe will add live edit capabilities so you can quickly iterate code changes in an emulator or real device without having to rebuild the app. And Android Studio Hedgehog will add emulator support for the newly announced foldable and tablet devices, a new Espresso API for handling rotation changes, folds, and other configuration changes on virtual devices, and of course the new Studio Bot.

And Google is releasing Compose for TV in alpha, bringing the power of its Jetpack Compose UI framework to developers targeting the 150 million Android TV devices out in the world. Compose for TV gives developers Material 3 UI capabilities, TV design guidelines, and TV-optimized components, and it comes with a ton of documentation and codelabs.

Web

For web developers, Google revealed hundreds of new APIs and several interesting initiatives. Here are some of the key advances:

The newly available WebGPU API makes the web AI-ready by unlocking the power of the local GPU for web apps; ML libraries can run up to 100x faster, and WebGPU expands on the speed of WebGL by 3x.

WebAssembly now supports managed memory languages like Kotlin and Dart, which allows developers to bring their Android codebases to the web. Android developers using Kotlin can now write their app features once, and use WebAssembly to deploy it to the web, Google says.

In addition to extending the Manifest V3 rollout timeline for Chrome extension writers, Google is improving the Chrome Web Store UI and updating its extension documentation.

A lot of the new APIs are related to new responsive web UI features, customizable components with accessible defaults and browser-managed state, and new animation and interactions APIs. These should further serve to make web apps look and feel more sophisticated.

Finally, the Chrome DevTools have been improved with new debugging capabilities, cleaner stack traces, a new “show your code” option, and improved breakpoint reliability.

Firebase

Google’s Firebase is a set of back-end services for developers that includes databases, authentication, and more. And at I/O, Google announced a set of updates that make Firebase even better using AI. Key among them is the ability to use the PaLM API—the foundational model behind Google’s in-house AI experiences—via new extensions so that developers can add AI capabilities to their apps. Called the Chatbot with PaLM API extension for Firebase, this extension is now in preview, connecting the PaLM API with Firestore so that developers can add intelligent chat capabilities to their apps with Google’s latest generative AI technology.

In addition, Firebase Hosting now supports WebAssembly Flutter web, Cloud Functions for Firebase 2nd Gen is now generally available, letting Firebase developers run backend code more efficiently, and new updates to Firebase App Check will help prevent billing fraud, phishing, app impersonation, and other abuses.