In the interest of transparency, we want to share high-level details of our roadmap, so that others can see our priorities and make plans based off the work we are doing.
Our plans will evolve over time based on customer feedback and new market opportunities. We use our quarterly surveys and feedback on GitHub issues to prioritize work. The list here shouldn‘t be viewed either as exhaustive, nor a promise that we will complete all this work. If you have feedback about what you think we should be working on, we encourage you to get in touch (e.g. by filing an issue, or using the “thumbs-up” emoji reaction on an issue’s first comment). Flutter is an open source project, we invite contributions both towards the themes presented below and in other areas.
If you are a contributor or team of contributors with long-term plans for contributing to Flutter, and would like your planned efforts reflected in the roadmap, please reach out to Hixie (ian@hixie.ch).
This roadmap is aspirational; it represents some of what our most active contributors to Flutter and Dart have told us they plan to work on this year. It is in general difficult to make any guarantees about engineering work, and it is all the more so for an open source project with hundreds of contributors.
We continue to focus on quality and performance with Impeller. We plan on completing the iOS migration to Impeller by removing the Skia backend on iOS. On Android we expect that Impeller will support Vulkan and OpenGLES; in the near term, we will also have an opt-out to use Skia instead. Additionally, we would like to improve Impeller testing infrastructure to reduce regressions in production.
For the core framework we expect to complete the effort to fully support Material 3. We're also investigating options to generalize the core framework to better support the adaptations needed to meet design expectations on Apple devices, such as app bars and tab bars.
Work is also expected to continue on blankcanvas.
In 2023 we started an initiative to support multiple Flutter views — in 2024 our plan is to extend this support to Android and iOS. We're also working on improving the performance and test coverage/testability of platform views.
We‘ll continue to modernize iOS offerings by enabling/supporting latest Apple standards, such as the privacy manifests and Swift Package Manager. We’ll also investigate needed support for future Android releases.
On Android we'll look into supporting Kotlin in Android build files.
Interop is important to interface with native code from Dart. We expect to complete the work to support invoking Objective C code directly from Dart, and we‘ll investigate support to invoke Swift code directly. Likewise for Android, we’ll continue work on the support to call into Java and Android. We'll also look into better support for calling APIs that might only be invoked on the main OS/platform thread.
We‘re seeing an increasing trend that larger Flutter apps often start as hybrid apps (an app that contains both Flutter code and some Android/iOS platform code/UI). We’ll look into how we can better support this, both in terms of performance/overhead and developer ergonomics.
We'll continue to focus on performance and quality, including investigating reducing the overall application size, better use of multi-threading, supporting platform views, improving app load times, making CanvasKit the default renderer, improving text input, and investigating options for supporting SEO for Flutter web.
We expect to complete the effort to compile Dart to WasmGC, and with that support Wasm compilation of Flutter web apps. This also includes a new JS interop mechanism for Dart that supports both JS and Wasm compilation.
We also plan to resume work to support hot reload on the web.
While we expect the majority of our time to be spent on mobile and web platforms (as discussed above), we are still planning some advancements on desktop platforms:
We're planning on collaborating with AI frameworks to support a new era of AI powered Flutter apps.
We are not planning on expanding the set of flutter.dev plugins we maintain, but will rather focus on raising the quality of the existing plugins, and resolving core feature gaps (for example, investigating an updated shared_preferences API that better supports use of isolates and to add-to-app use case). We'll also support community initiatives like Flutter Favorites.
We'll also continue to add support for building casual games with Flutter, as a joint effort with the Flame community.
We hope to integrate with AI solutions to offer AI assistance for core programming tasks.
We‘ll also continue to collaborate with Google’s IDX team, and explore integration with design tools.
The Dart team expects to complete the assessment of the viability of supporting macros in Dart, and in 2024 either ship the first phases of supporting them, or if we discover unmitigable architectural issues, abandon the effort. Key use cases for macros include serialization/deserialization, data classes, and general extensibility.
We'll investigate a number of more incremental language features, such as syntax changes to reduce verbosity (for example, primary constructors and import syntax shorthand), and better support for statically checked variance.
Finally, we'll look into re-use of Dart business logic in more places, and more pluggability/extensibility for Dart (for example, in DevTools and Analyzer).
We plan to have four stable releases and 12 beta releases during 2024, similar to 2023.
We're still not planning on investing in built-in support for code push or hot updates. For code push, our friends at shorebird.dev may have offerings of interest. For UI push (also known as server-driven UI), we recommend the rfw package.
We maintain an archive of roadmaps from previous years in a separate page.