Flutter Spring 2020 Update
Article Summary
Tim Sneath from Google's Flutter team shares a milestone: 2 million developers adopted Flutter in just 16 months. Even more impressive? The framework saw 10% month-over-month growth during the pandemic's early days.
This Spring 2020 update reveals Flutter's explosive enterprise adoption and introduces major changes to the release process. Google shares detailed usage statistics, highlights Nubank's migration story, and announces a new branching model designed to improve stability and predictability for production apps.
Key Takeaways
- 50,000 Flutter apps now live in Play Store, 10,000 added last month alone
- Nubank unified frontend teams on Flutter after detailed framework analysis
- New branching model adds beta channel with stabilization period before stable releases
- 78% of developers use stable channel, 60% develop on Windows machines
- Provider, RxDart, and cached_network_image top the third party package charts
Flutter reached 2 million developers with 500K monthly active users while overhauling its release process to support enterprise scale and predictability.
About This Article
Flutter's original release process didn't clearly explain when builds happened or what code made it in. Branches weren't tested before hotfix releases, which led to regressions that hurt both contributors and developers.
Tim Sneath's team built a new branching model that included stabilization periods. They cherry-picked critical fixes for beta releases and moved beta to stable roughly every quarter. They also aligned Dart's release process and added testing infrastructure for branches.
The versioning system now uses `.pre` annotations and hotfix increments to show pre-release status. This lets developers test beta candidates with confidence and shape stable release quality through Flutter's cherry-pick process.