What's New in Flutter 3.38

Kevin Chisholm from Google's Flutter team just dropped Flutter 3.38, and it's packed with the kind of productivity wins developers have been asking for. Dot shorthands alone will save you countless lines of boilerplate code.

Flutter 3.38 represents a major quarterly release focused on developer experience improvements. With 825 commits from 145 contributors (37 first-timers), this update delivers syntactic sugar, enhanced tooling, and critical platform compatibility updates across iOS, Android, and web.

Key Takeaways

• Dot shorthands let you write .start instead of MainAxisAlignment.start throughout your code
• Widget Previews now integrate directly into VSCode and Android Studio IDEs
• iOS apps must migrate to UIScene lifecycle before next iOS release
• Android 16KB page size support now required for Google Play by November 2025
• Performance overlay refactored for more accurate profiling with less overhead

The Material and Cupertino decoupling effort is revealing some fascinating architectural decisions that will reshape how Flutter handles platform-specific UI.