Google IO Announcements in 2022

📅 2022.07.22 - 👤 Borbély Viktor

This year, Google organized its events around no fewer than 14 topics. Among these were major platform announcements as well as workshops. In my report, I pick from the technological innovations. From these, I mainly collected interesting things related to mobile development. But not only these! Read on!

Flutter is here to stay, that’s for sure

Kevin Boateng, Flutter Product Marketing Manager, condensed this in his 5-minute summary.

Big news was that Flutter 3 version was released. Since the 2018 beginnings when Flutter 1.0 was released, from 2 mobile platforms, 6 platforms are now supported. This comes together as 2 mobile, the web, and 3 desktop - Windows, Linux, and Mac OS are on the list. Yes! With a common codebase. If we choose packages well and make platform-specific settings and checks in a few places, we can talk about 80-90% common codebase.

To these, I would add what is not officially promoted yet, but I see more and more in the community that server-side solutions are also spreading. Who knows, maybe one day it will mature, but the Dart language still needs to evolve a lot. And this is not on Google’s roadmap.

This means real cost savings in a software development company’s life.

Firebase got even better

I regularly read articles where developers present their tips or use cases where Flutter helped them. After the Google IO event, as it usually happens, reflective articles arrive. From among these, Andrew Zuo pointed out an important thing on Medium.com.

Until now, Firebase had to be set up manually for a new project. Although there wasn’t much hassle with it, still. However, hours before the Google IO event, the firebase.flutter.dev documentation description moved to firebase.google.com/docs/flutter/setup. This is clear proof that from now on, Flutter has become a first-class citizen of the Firebase ecosystem.

Accordingly, Firebase CLI has arrived, which makes creating a new project easier. From now on, we don’t have to click in the browser, instead we can set it up from the command line.

Not new, just the usual things

This update, besides finally delivering on Google’s efforts, didn’t bring many new things on the mobile front.

The “usual” speed improvement on iOS platform. Even better memory management. Further reducing the downloaded application size. These perhaps pale in today’s world when every phone is already faster, bigger, smarter. But let’s not forget! We get these from time to time without having to do almost anything for them. We just need to follow the framework’s evolution and keep the framework version up to date.

Flutter apps still have room to trim size, but they are already sufficiently small. The runtime environment itself adds about 5 Mb. My feeling is that when Fuchsia OS spreads, it will already be natively capable of running apps, and this minimal runtime layer can also be omitted.

As can be seen, Google doesn’t rest in the field of mobile development. It’s building a timeless solution to meet market needs.

If you are also thinking about developing a mobile application but don’t know how to approach it, or are looking for the right team, contact me. With the Flutter framework, you get 2 for the price of 1.

You need to manage 1 developer (team).

Your product is completed twice as fast for both platforms (Android, iOS).

Your product is completed at half the cost.

It’s a matter of perspective, Your perspective!

If you have questions, contact me through one of my contacts.

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