Google's Flutter pushes forward with its first Release Preview

On June 20, the team behind Flutter announced that its development platform was officially exiting the beta stage it entered in February and moving into Release Preview 1.

Flutter is a mobile UI framework that aims to help developers make high-quality apps that work on both Android and iOS as easily and seamlessly as possible. There was a sizable showcase for Flutter during Google I/O in May, and since then, the Flutter team says it's seen a 50% increase for its active user-base.

Release Preview 1 is a big milestone for Flutter, with Editor Tim Sneath saying that it "signals our confidence in the stability and quality of what we have, and our focus on bug fixing and stabilization."

Anyone using the Flutter beta can upgrade to Release Preview 1 by entering the command $ flutter upgrade, and once you do, you'll have access to an updated extension for Visual Studio Code, improvements to the video playback package, a new tool that allows you to add Flutter widgets to existing Android/iOS apps, and more.

There have already been a number of apps created using Flutter, and as the software keeps progressing through Release Previews and eventually enters a stable channel, it's going to be immensely exciting to see what else developers create with it.

Google Podcasts: Everything you need to know!