What's New In Flutter 3.29

Exciting news for the Flutter community! The release of Flutter 3.29 brings a host of enhancements aimed at refining development and boosting performance across platforms. Here's a concise overview of what's new:

Cupertino Updates

• Navigation Bars: CupertinoNavigationBar and CupertinoSliverNavigationBar now accept a bottom widget, typically used for elements like search fields or segmented controls. In Cupertino Silver NavigationBar, the bottomMode property allows this widget to either resize until hidden or remain always visible during scrolling.
• New Features: Introduction of CupertinoSheetRoute for iOS-styled modal sheet views with drag-to-dismiss gestures and a new showCupertinoSheet function for streamlined nested navigation.

Material Design Enhancements

• Page Transitions: The new FadeForwardsPageTransitionsBuilder aligns with Android's latest page transition behavior, offering a sliding and fading effect for incoming and outgoing pages.
• Progress Indicators: Updates to CircularProgressIndicator and LinearProgressIndicator now align with the latest Material Design 3 specifications.
• Sliders: The latest Material 3 Slider design features updated track and handle shapes. To enable this design, set year2023 to false or adjust SliderThemeData.year2023 accordingly.

Text Selection Improvements

• Selection Listener: Flutter introduces SelectionListener and SelectionListenerNotifier, providing detailed information about selections within a SelectionArea or SelectableRegion.

Accessibility Enhancements

• Improved Announcements: The Form widget now announces only the first encountered error when a screen reader is enabled, and dropdown menus have improved label announcements for better accessibility.

Web Platform Updates

• WebAssembly (wasm) Support: Flutter's WebAssembly support has been enhanced, allowing applications to run with default headers, albeit limited to a single thread. Updating headers enables multi-threading capabilities.
• Image Handling: Fixes include asynchronous image decoding off the UI thread to prevent jank and improved Image.network functionality with CORS images.

Engine Enhancements

• Impeller Vulkan Stability: Numerous improvements have been made to the Vulkan backend, addressing issues like flickering and visual jitter on older devices. Additionally, Android devices without functional Vulkan drivers now default to Impeller running on OpenGLES.
• Dart Threading Changes: Flutter on Android and iOS now executes Dart code on the application's main thread, facilitating synchronous calls to and from the platform without the overhead of serialization and message passing.

DevTools and IDEs

• New DevTools Inspector: Enabled by default, the updated inspector offers a condensed widget tree, a new widget properties view and an option to automatically update in response to hot-reload and navigation events.
• Logging Tool Improvements: The Logging tool now includes more metadata, supports filtering by log severity level and boasts significant performance enhancements.

Breaking Changes and Deprecations

• Discontinued Packages: Support for several packages, including ios_platform_images, css_colors, and palette_generator, is planned to be discontinued on April 30th, 2025. The community is encouraged to maintain forks if interested.
• Gradle Plugin Application: The script-based application of the Flutter Gradle plugin has been removed. Projects created before version 3.16 should migrate to avoid build issues.

For a comprehensive list of updates and detailed information, please refer to the official Flutter 3.29 release notes.