Google released Flutter in 2015 as a cross-platform UI that allows developers to create UIs for native Android, iOS, web, and desktop applications using a single codebase. Google began looking for Microsoft’s cooperation in bringing Flutter to Microsoft. And now, we’re excited to announce the alpha release of Flutter support for Windows, which will enable developers to create high-performance apps that feel natural across platforms.
Adding Windows to Flutter
Flutter is mainly developed under the flutter-desktop-embedding repository, where the majority of the activities can be found. As a result, you may quickly establish new projects on Mac OS’s master/development channel. However, it only works on the master channel in Windows/Linux. Alternatively, you can copy (clone) the Windows and Linux folders and paste them into the existing one that already has Linux and Windows projects defined. You will find it straightforward to execute if you have frame styles like the Visual Studio 2019 toolchain on Windows and some packages on Linux, albeit it will take a few hours to set everything up on Windows and Linux. Another issue that Flutter meets while running the application in Flutter desktop is that the supported target platforms inside Flutter currently only include Mac OS. As a result, it is unable to display widgets. As a result, you’ll have to rewrite it, but if you’re using the Flutter desktop embedding repository, everything will be set up for you, and you’ll be good to go.
Adding support for desktop form factors with web, Windows, Mac OS, and Linux introduces a whole new set of services, such as robust support for keyboards, mice, mouse wheels, and controllers on the input side, as well as widgets that adapt to or even work best at the larger screen sizes that come with web and desktop apps. In the case of Windows, new toolchain targets have been added to the CLI and IDE.
For Windows, it’s a Win32/C++ program that loads your Flutter code and executes it at runtime. It’s a good place to add native code to your app if you need it. Plugins for the Flutter for desktop (which is a mixture of Dart code and native code) allows you to interact with the platform’s native features such as clipboard or local notifications. So far there are 10 official plugins for desktop and we can find a few plugins that can run on Windows such as window_size, path_provider, url_launcher, etc.
Conclusion
This alpha release provides a solid basis upon which we will build in the following months. We believe that by adding support for Windows, clever developers will be able to get started.
