Flutter 3.32 Support and Review

Shorebird

The Shorebird Team

We’re excited to announce that Shorebird now fully supports Flutter 3.32.0 and Dart 3.8! If you’re looking to update your Flutter apps with Shorebird, just upgrade to Shorebird v1.6.39 and you’ll be good to go. All it takes is a quick shorebird upgrade to ensure you’re running the latest version.

We also wanted to take a moment to share our thoughts on these new releases. They bring significant enhancements that streamline cross-platform development and improve performance — not just for our customers, but for the entire Flutter community. While we won’t rehash everything (you can read the official Flutter and Dart posts for the full details), we’d like to highlight a few of our favorite changes.

Look and Feel Improvements

Google has introduced support for Apple “squircles” and made numerous enhancements to the Cupertino library, improving the iOS look and feel for Flutter apps. While some of these changes are subtle, they’re crucial for apps to look and feel their best. If you’re targeting iOS, your apps should feel even more polished for your users.

Source credit - Arthur Van Siclen

Similarly, the Flutter team has made a wide range of improvements to Material components, ensuring your apps shine on Android as well. Flutter was created to help developers bring any design to life, and seeing the team continue to refine its visual fidelity is always music to our ears.

Enhanced Formatting

Dart 3.8 includes updates to the code formatter, which now intelligently manages trailing commas and line breaks. This results in cleaner diffs and more consistent code formatting across all of your projects.

// Previously released formatter (functions)
function(
  name:
      (param) => another(
        argument1,
        argument2,
      ),
);

// Dart 3.8 formatter (functions)
function(
  name: (param) => another(
    argument1,
    argument2,
  ),
);

Developers can opt into these changes by updating their pubspec.yaml to specify the new language version. To opt in, simply update your environment SDK constraints:

environment:
  sdk: ^3.8.0

While Dart 3.7 also included some of these changes, they were not configurable, prompting some developers to skip the upgrade. With Dart 3.8, you now have full control.

formatter:
  trailing_commas: preserve

We’ve navigated these formatting changes internally as well. It’s great to see the Dart team improving tooling while giving developers the flexibility to adopt changes on their own timeline.

Cross-Compilation

This one may only apply to a subset of Dart and Flutter developers, but it’s extremely exciting for those it does. Dart 3.8 introduces cross-compilation capabilities, allowing you to compile native binaries for any device from any device. If you’re working with embedded devices this is a huge leap forward. You no longer need to compile directly on the target device.

This is just the beginning of Dart’s cross-compilation journey. While this release focuses on Dart-level capabilities, we’re excited about the potential for Flutter-level cross-compilation, such as building iOS apps from Windows. Thanks to Shorebird and our partners at Codemagic, Flutter developers are already simulating aspects of this today.

One of our customers, EasySpend, specifically mentioned that acquiring Apple hardware was cost-prohibitive for their team, yet their users expect iOS apps. Cross-compilation opens the door to multi-platform development without changing your host OS.

Merging UI and Platform Threads

While this last one is mostly under the hood and unlikely to affect your app, you should be aware that there has been a large internal change in how Flutter operates. Flutter 3.32.0 merges the UI (Dart) and Platform (Swift/Kotlin) threads to reduce latency and improve performance. This internal re-architecture minimizes thread communication overhead, enabling future capabilities like direct calls from Dart into native platform APIs.

Historically, these threads were separated to protect Dart code from being blocked by long-running platform operations, a common issue in web development. But with today’s faster mobile devices and the trend of unified threading in native frameworks like SwiftUI, Flutter is following suit.

You likely won’t notice any changes. But if your app does start to stutter unexpectedly after upgrading, it’s worth checking whether your platform code is taking too long to execute.

Our Commitment

At Shorebird, we’re committed to supporting the latest advancements in Flutter and Dart. Our tools and services are fully compatible with Flutter 3.32.0 and Dart 3.8, enabling you to build fast, reliable, cross-platform apps with confidence.

This particular release took us a bit of extra time to support as there were a lot of changes (kudos to the Google team for moving fast!). Generally, you can expect Shorebird updates to follow quickly after Flutter hits the stable channel.