Flutter has the following channels, in increasing order of stability.
master (aka main)The current tip-of-tree, absolute latest cutting edge build. Usually functional, though sometimes we accidentally break things. We do not run the entirety of our testing before allowing patches to land on this branch. We do not recommend using this branch unless you are contributing to Flutter.
The API documentation for the most recent commit on master is staged at: https://master-api.flutter.dev
The Flutter team's plugins and packages are regularly tested against the master branch.
We are planning to rename this channel to main soon; this work is tracked in flutter#121564.
betaThe latest stable release. If you want to be using the latest and greatest, the beta branch is the right choice. That's the most recent version of Flutter that we have heavily tested. The beta branch has passed all our public testing, has been verified against test suites for Google products that use Flutter, and has been vetted against contributed private test suites.
We branch from master for a new beta release at the beginning of the month, usually the first Wednesday. This includes a branch for Dart, the engine and the framework. These branches are then “stabilized” for the next couple of weeks, meaning we accept cherrypick requests for high impact issues. Once a quarter, the beta branch lives on to become the next stable branch, as detailed below.
On average it takes about two weeks for a fix to end up in the beta branch after it lands in our repository (in the master channel).
We do not host the API documentation for the current beta branch. The documentation for the stable branch at https://api.flutter.dev is usually correct, but may be missing new features. The documentation for the master branch at https://master-api.flutter.dev is likely to be more up to date but may mention features that are not yet on the beta branch.
stableRoughly speaking, every third beta is promoted to stable. This is essentially the same as the beta branch but with less frequent updates.
We recommend using this channel for new users and for production app releases.
In case of high severity, high impact or security issues, we may do a hotfix release for the stable channel just like we do for beta. This will follow the same cherrypick process.
The stable version of Flutter is the one documented by our API documentation at: https://api.flutter.dev
The Flutter team's plugins and packages are continually tested against the latest stable branch.
You can see which channel you're on with the following command:
$ flutter channel Flutter channels: * stable beta master
To switch channels, run flutter channel [<channel-name>], and then run flutter upgrade to ensure you're on the latest.
Depending on the severity of the issue, it is possible. Refer to the cherrypick process for details.
If you really need a particular patch and it‘s a fix to the flutter/flutter repository, you should feel free to create a Flutter branch yourself on your development machine and cherry-pick the fix you want onto that branch. Flutter is distributed as a git repository and all of git‘s tools are available to you. If you need a particular patch that’s from the flutter/engine repository or one of our dependencies (e.g. Dart or Skia), you could build your own engine but it’s probably easier to just wait until the next release. On average, the next beta release is about two weeks away.