What's new in Flutter 3.50

Flutter 3.50 is fully baked and ready to serve alongside Dart 3.14. This release brings a set of updates that showcase where Flutter is headed next. Direct native interop is now stable, letting you call between Dart and native platform APIs. Faster WebAssembly across Safari and Firefox, alongside browser-native text layout, gives Flutter web apps a major speed boost. We've also expanded our platform embedder APIs for custom hardware, and now the standalone material_ui and cupertino_ui packages are the default for new projects.

As always, we couldn't do any of this without the Flutter community and all of your contributions across the framework and ecosystem. In this release cycle alone, 188 contributors, including 69 first-time contributors, landed over 1,200 commits. So, run flutter upgrade in your terminal to get the latest release, or read on to explore what's new.

Direct native interoperability

Last year, we shared our vision for direct native interoperability to eliminate the serialization overhead, string-based plumbing, and mandatory async latency of traditional platform channels. In Flutter 3.50, that multi-year investment reaches production readiness: FFIgen for Objective-C and JNIgen for Java and Kotlin join FFIgen's long-standing C support as stable. You can also preview Pigeon's new native interop mode, which uses both generators to create type-safe bindings under the hood.

For any native integration, you can now skip platform-channel message passing and call between Dart and platform code directly, including synchronously or from background isolates. Use FFIgen to bind C and Objective-C APIs, or use JNIgen to bind Android system APIs and custom Java or Kotlin libraries in your Flutter and Dart apps. When building multi-platform plugins, Pigeon's native interop mode handles data conversion and native lifetimes automatically on iOS, macOS, and Android.

Thank you to all the package authors, contributors, and Early Access Program participants, especially Jon Holtan, Rody Davis, Dominik Roszkowski, Alexander Thiele, and Morgan McKenzie. These community members tested early builds, reviewed documentation, and helped shape these APIs. Stay tuned for a dedicated post on direct native interop.

Learn more: Native interop documentation

Web platform

On the web, Flutter 3.50 pairs faster cross-browser WebAssembly execution with built-in asset cache busting, modern JS interop checks, and smaller, browser-native text rendering.

WebAssembly on Safari and Firefox

Running flutter build web --wasm compiles your app to both WebAssembly and JavaScript, falling back to JavaScript automatically on older browsers. Chromium-based browsers (Chrome and Edge 137+) already run WebAssembly by default. In Flutter 3.50, Safari 26.2+ (macOS and iOS) and Firefox 147+ deliver over 2x the frame rate of JavaScript on heavy widget benchmarks, and you can opt in today using web/flutter_bootstrap.js before they become enabled by default in a future stable release:

{{flutter_js}}
{{flutter_build_config}}
_flutter.loader.load({
  config: {
    wasmAllowList: {
      blink: true,
      webkit: true,
      gecko: true,
    },
  },
});

Learn more: Support for WebAssembly (Wasm)

Built-in web content hashing

Deploying an updated Flutter web app can leave returning users with stale JavaScript or mismatched assets cached in their browser. Passing --web-content-hash to flutter build web solves this by embedding content hashes into your compiled JavaScript, WebAssembly, and build/web/assets/** filenames and updating flutter_bootstrap.js automatically. That lets you cache hashed app bundles and assets for up to a year (Cache-Control: public, max-age=31536000, immutable) while keeping index.html and flutter_bootstrap.js on no-cache so every deploy loads cleanly. The flag also generates build/web/precache_manifest.json for custom service workers and Workbox pipelines, replacing the deprecated flutter_service_worker.js tokens.

Learn more: Web content hashing and HTTP caching

Auditing legacy JS interop on web

Flutter web apps and plugins use JS interop libraries to access browser features like local storage or wrap third-party JavaScript SDKs. Dart's older JS-only libraries (dart:html, dart:js, dart:js_util, and package:js) are now deprecated in favor of dart:js_interop and package:web. These modern replacements work across both JavaScript and WebAssembly builds, and the legacy libraries will be removed in a future Dart release. Pass --no-deprecated-js-interop to flutter build web, flutter run, or flutter test --platform chrome to catch outdated JS imports. This fails the build early if your app or any of its packages still depend on legacy browser libraries, helping you prepare for WebAssembly.

Learn more: Using compatible JS interop libraries and Announcing Dart 3.14

Native browser text layout preview

Built in collaboration with the Chrome team on Chrome's experimental Enhanced TextMetrics API, WebParagraph lets the browser shape operating-system fonts directly on the canvas instead of bundling C++ font parsers. Delegating text layout to the browser shrinks the CanvasKit download (to roughly 3.75 MB, down from 5.46 MB), eliminates network requests for fallback fonts, prevents missing-character tofu boxes across international scripts, and renders native color emojis.

Learn more: WebParagraph experimental preview (#172561)

Pluggable platforms

Following up on our Google I/O Pluggable Platforms announcement, we're continuing to make Flutter easier to port to new operating systems and hardware. In Flutter 3.50, we closed two key gaps in the underlying Impeller and Vulkan embedder APIs. Community contributor xiaowei-guan added Vulkan external texture support so custom embedders can pass textures directly to the engine for sampling across Impeller and Skia backends. Custom embedders can now invoke FlutterEngineNotifyLowMemoryWarning to purge Impeller's offscreen render target cache immediately under memory pressure.

Decoupled design packages

Following the 1.0 launch of standalone material_ui and cupertino_ui in Flutter 3.47, Flutter 3.50 formally deprecates the coupled package:flutter/material.dart and package:flutter/cupertino.dart libraries alongside their localization delegates in package:flutter_localizations. New projects created with flutter create now import package:material_ui by default.

Run dart fix --apply --code=migrate_design_widgets to update existing imports and localization delegates automatically.

Learn more: Material and Cupertino migration guide and Decoupling Material and Cupertino

Framework

Across the core framework, community and team contributions add sliver clipping widgets, steadier text selection, logical image caching, accessibility improvements, and desktop multi-window updates.

Scrolling and slivers

Community contributors delivered standout upgrades for custom scroll views in Flutter 3.50. Emmanuel Lefebvre Dibon added SliverClipRect and SliverClipRRect with a clipOverlap option to round or clip scrolling sections without cutting off pinned headers. Mairramer added itemExtentBuilder to ListView.separated so lists with dividers can size variable-height rows on demand without building offscreen widgets. Mairramer also introduced ScrollPhysics.shouldUpdate so apps can update scroll behavior dynamically when configuration settings change. Soroush Yousefpour updated RawScrollbar.mouseCursor to change the mouse pointer only over the scrollbar thumb and track, keeping the standard cursor over nearby content. Framework fixes now stop Scrollable.ensureVisible at the exact offset needed to reveal a pinned header instead of scrolling past it. SliverFillRemaining now calculates overscroll stretch offsets accurately at the end of a scroll view. Finally, TreeSliver clips expanding and collapsing branches cleanly so animated child rows never overlap neighboring items.

Text input and selection

Text editing and selection are now noticeably steadier across mobile, web, and desktop. Alex Li added a password option to TextInputType.numberWithOptions so Android apps can open a secure numeric keypad for PIN entry. Android apps can also use AutofillHints.emailOTPCode to autofill one-time verification codes from email. A new Hyphens enum lets you control whether soft hyphens appear visibly when words wrap across lines. Nicodemus Lin stopped the screen from jumping when users drag the top selection handle in multi-line text. Nickolas de Luca Alberton fixed up and down arrow-key cursor movement in centered and right-aligned single-line text fields. Dragging to select text inside a PageView no longer flips accidentally to neighboring pages. Selection handles also stay pointed toward the selected text when mixing left-to-right and right-to-left scripts.

Image and painting APIs

Community contributors also rounded out Flutter's image loading and caching APIs. Kishan Rathore added a placeholder ImageProvider to DecorationImage so container backgrounds can display a fallback image while loading. Anas Saifi added FadeInImageTransition.fadeInOver to fade images smoothly over opaque placeholders without a blank flash. Koji Wakamiya added useLogicalSize on ResizeImage and useLogicalCacheSize on Image to scale cached images to screen density without needing a BuildContext. Ishaq Hassan exposed blendMode on RawImage so custom widgets can apply color blending effects directly when drawing an image. Custom BoxBorder shapes now transition smoothly between states during animations. Color animations using HSVColor.lerp and HSLColor.lerp now take the shortest path around the color wheel, avoiding unexpected color shifts.

Accessibility and navigation

Flutter 3.50 improves keyboard navigation, screen-reader support, and dialog customization across platforms. Custom slider widgets can now use SemanticsRole.slider so screen readers announce their values and controls accurately. Apps can check MediaQueryData.reduceMotion to detect the user's Reduce Motion setting and swap slide animations for gentle fades. Pressing Escape now closes open Tooltip and RawTooltip overlays without moving keyboard focus, meeting web accessibility standards. On web, VoiceOver and WidgetsApp.router fixes keep screen-reader and keyboard focus steady inside overlays instead of resetting unexpectedly. A new skipTraversal option on FocusableActionDetector from Ishaq Hassan lets custom interactive widgets opt out of Tab-key navigation. For dialogs, a new barrierBuilder callback on showDialog from Mairramer lets you customize modal backdrops, such as adding background blur. Finally, Navigator.popUntilWithResult now returns its result to the last popped route, even when the destination route has local history entries.

Desktop windowing

In partnership with Canonical, and thanks to maintainers Robert Ancell, Matthew Kosarek, and Matej Knopp, Flutter's experimental multi-window desktop APIs continue to mature across Linux, macOS, and Windows. On Linux, apps can build custom title bars, transparent windows, and native drag-to-move or resize controls using WindowControllerLinux. On macOS, windows and dialogs can size themselves to fit their content before appearing, preventing a visible resize flash on launch. Across all three desktop platforms, RegularWindow is now named Window for simpler multi-window code. Its shrinkWrap property also replaces sizedToContent to match Flutter's familiar layout naming. Finally, WindowManager now sits above WidgetsApp so secondary windows can run their own independent UI and navigation state.

Engine

Under the hood, Flutter 3.50 expands Impeller's hardware-accelerated primitive rendering, improves mobile GPU stability, and upgrades Windows and Linux graphics fidelity.

Impeller rendering

Impeller's Signed Distance Field (SDF) renderer for macOS, Linux, and Windows draws sharp borders, shapes, and gradients directly on the GPU instead of calculating complex geometry on the CPU. This lowers frame render times and keeps scrolling and animations smooth, even on screens packed with cards, borders, and shadows. Flutter 3.50 extends this fast path to lines, thin borders, rounded corners, and gradients, while speeding up macOS gradients and repeated text shadows. For custom 3D scenes and 2D games, Flutter GPU adds support for 2D texture arrays. Game and graphics developers can now batch sprite sheets, tilemaps, and terrain layers into fewer draw calls without visual seams between tiles. Flutter GPU also reports clearer Dart error messages when a shader pipeline is misconfigured, helping you catch and fix graphics bugs faster.

Community contributors also landed high-impact OpenGL startup and GPU stability fixes. xiaowei-guan moved OpenGL shader setup to a background thread so apps display their first frame faster. seunggi resolved Mali GPU crashes when loading textures, preventing unexpected app exits on affected Android devices. krll-kov fixed OpenGL ES 2 texture rendering on older devices and preserved transparency across frames in animated images. Flutter also falls back automatically from Vulkan to OpenGL on B-series PowerVR GPUs to prevent rendering glitches.

Desktop graphics

On Windows and Linux, desktop rendering picks up key fidelity and performance upgrades. The Windows engine now requests OpenGL ES 3 by default while retaining automatic OpenGL ES 2 fallback support, unlocking modern graphics features without dropping older PCs. Windows apps can now load assets and files from paths with non-ASCII characters, such as international usernames or folder names. Windows also renders crisper text with improved contrast and skips an extra full-screen copy each frame to reduce GPU overhead. On both Windows and Linux, improved anti-aliasing smooths jagged edges on layered UI elements and custom shapes.

iOS and macOS

As our first stable release since Xcode 27 and iOS 27 shipped, Flutter 3.50 cuts iOS touch latency, smooths physical-device debugging, and continues moving off CocoaPods and Intel Macs.

Faster iOS touch response

A major rework of how the engine schedules frame generation following iOS touch events, contributed by community member Matej Knopp, delivers touch events to the framework immediately so the frame builds in the same display refresh rather than waiting for the next vsync. The result is a full frame less input latency (16 ms faster on 60 Hz iOS devices and 8 ms faster on 120 Hz ProMotion displays), verified through extensive benchmarking on hardware going all the way back to the 2015 iPhone 6s. We have more work underway to drive iOS input latency down even further in upcoming releases. Stay tuned.

Learn more: iOS touch input latency benchmarks (#191199)

Debugging on iOS 27

Running an app on a newly paired or freshly upgraded iPhone no longer stalls on a white screen until you open Xcode once. The Flutter CLI now prepares the device automatically and tells you what to do if preparation fails. Flutter 3.50 also resolves intermittent launch crashes when running flutter run on iOS 27 devices. Building with Xcode 27 restores flutter screenshot on physical iPhones and iPads for the first time since iOS 17. You can now capture screenshots of a running app straight from your terminal during debugging.

Swift Package Manager transition

With the CocoaPods trunk becoming read-only in December 2026, Flutter's temporary CocoaPods fallback is winding down. Starting in Flutter 3.50, disabling Swift Package Manager triggers a warning on every Flutter CLI command. In a future release, we'll remove the opt-out flag and eventually the CocoaPods fallback itself. If you previously disabled Swift Package Manager to work around a build issue, re-enable it now to verify your setup.

Learn more: Swift Package Manager for plugin authors

Apple Silicon macOS builds

Flutter no longer tests on Intel Mac hardware, and the CLI now warns once when you build on an Intel Mac. When a future release removes Intel Mac host support, building for iOS, macOS, or Android will require an Apple Silicon Mac. Because Xcode 27 no longer requires macOS apps to bundle Intel slices, you can build Apple Silicon-only macOS apps today by running flutter config --enable-macos-arm64-only before it becomes the default in an upcoming release.

Learn more: macOS Intel deprecation strategy

Android

On Android, Flutter 3.50 hardens release-mode Intent security, expands Hybrid Composition++ for platform views, and unlocks opt-in support for Android Gradle Plugin 9's new DSL.

Intent security hardening

Previously, Android apps built with Flutter accepted runtime Intent configuration extras from any app installed on a user's device. Flutter 3.50 closes this vulnerability in release builds while keeping standard deep linking intact: release builds ignore route, dart_entrypoint, and cached_engine_id values from external Intent extras, and reject runtime engine flags such as --dart-flags supplied through Intent extras or paired with a prebuilt release APK (--use-application-binary). Debug builds log warnings for ignored extras, while testing custom engine flags against a prebuilt binary now requires profile mode or a fresh build.

Learn more: Stricter Android Intent verification for app entrypoints and Restrict Android engine flags in release mode

Hybrid Composition++

Hybrid Composition++ (HCPP) is Flutter's newest platform view architecture for embedding native Android views such as maps and web views without the scroll tearing or text-input glitches of older compositing modes. By handing compositing directly to the Android OS, HCPP delivers smoother scrolling. Flutter 3.50 improves it further with unbuffered motion event dispatch on AndroidViewSurface and a layout ordering fix in RenderAndroidView. Community contributor Amaan Ansari also fixed a crash when a FlutterEngine outlives its Activity.

HCPP has been available since Flutter 3.44 stable and is now enabled by default on the beta channel as of 3.49.0-0.1.pre. It will become the stable default in a future release. Keep in mind that HCPP requires Android 14 (API 34) or higher and Impeller running on Vulkan; on devices that don't meet both requirements, Flutter automatically falls back to your existing platform view mode. On a supported API 34+ Vulkan device, run flutter config --enable-hcpp and watch logcat in debug mode for Using HCPP platform view rendering strategy when a platform view mounts.

Learn more: Hosting native Android views with Platform Views

Built-in Kotlin for plugins

As introduced in What's new in Flutter 3.44, Flutter plugins with Android code must migrate directly to the Android Gradle Plugin's Built-in Kotlin. Plugins that still manually apply the Kotlin Gradle Plugin (KGP), even behind an AGP version guard, will receive lower pub.dev scores in the future and will fail to build under AGP 10. Update your plugin's Gradle configuration, set your minimum SDK constraint to flutter: ">=3.44.0" in pubspec.yaml, and note the change in your CHANGELOG.md.

Learn more: Built-in Kotlin migration guide for plugin authors

AGP 9 new DSL support

Between Flutter 3.47 and Flutter 3.50, we rewrote the Flutter Gradle Plugin against the modern public Android Gradle Plugin 9 APIs rather than legacy BaseExtension internals. We also migrated all first-party plugins in flutter/packages to support Built-in Kotlin across their supported AGP versions. On Flutter 3.50 stable, you can opt your app into AGP 9's new DSL once every plugin in your project supports Built-in Kotlin.

Learn more: Built-in Kotlin migration guide for app developers

Updated Android toolchain defaults

New Android projects generated by Flutter 3.50 use Android Gradle Plugin (AGP) 9.3.1 and Gradle 9.5.0, verified against Kotlin Gradle Plugin 2.4.20 and a minimum of Java 17. When your project uses AGP's Built-in Kotlin, Flutter no longer prints Kotlin version warnings because AGP manages Kotlin compatibility directly. The default SDK variables exposed to your Gradle build files in this release are flutter.compileSdkVersion API 36, flutter.targetSdkVersion API 36, and flutter.minSdkVersion API 24.

Developer experience

Day-to-day workflow updates in Flutter 3.50 bring official AI agent plugins, reusable package skills, and faster cold rename refactoring in the Dart Analysis Server.

AI coding plugins and package skills

Flutter 3.50 expands first-party tooling for teams building with AI coding assistants. The official Flutter agent plugins bundle task-oriented agent skills, Dart and Flutter MCP server configuration, specialized agents, and persistent agent rules, including a proactive hot reload rule (flutter-hot-reload) that triggers hot_reload or hot_restart through the MCP server after edits under lib/.

Package authors can also ship agent skills directly inside a top-level skills/ directory in their pub.dev packages so app developers can discover and install skills from their package dependencies with dart run skills@ get. Before publishing, authors can run package:skills_lint in CI to check SKILL.md frontmatter, directory structure, and naming conventions against the Agent Skills spec.

Learn more: Get started developing with AI and Package skills

Analysis server and DevTools

In day-to-day editor workflows, the Dart Analysis Server deduplicates shared package directory discovery across analysis drivers when populating the search index, speeding up cold rename requests on multi-package workspaces (57% faster on the 16-context DevTools workspace, down from 2.0s to 0.9s). Additionally, Flutter DevTools now uses the standalone material_ui and cupertino_ui packages.

AI and ecosystem

Across the broader ecosystem, production AI packages hit major milestones alongside one million Google Play apps and an open Flutter RFC process.

Genkit Dart 1.0

Genkit Dart reaches its stable 1.0 release for building full-stack, multi-model agentic applications in Dart and Flutter with end-to-end type safety, streaming flows, tool calling, and OpenTelemetry tracing.

Learn more: Genkit Dart documentation

On-device AI with MediaPipe

Google AI Edge's new MediaPipe package on pub.dev brings 20 on-device vision, audio, and text tasks, powered by LiteRT and LiteRT-LM, straight to Flutter apps. Running these models directly on the device avoids network latency and cloud inference costs.

Learn more: MediaPipe Tasks for Flutter gallery

One million Play Store apps

The Flutter community recently crossed a landmark milestone: over one million Flutter apps published on Google Play. Thank you to every developer and team building, shipping, and growing with Flutter.

Package ecosystem highlights

Across the broader package ecosystem, recycling inline AdMob banners inside scrollable lists now delivers a measured 23% performance improvement on iOS in our benchmarks. We also want to highlight two standout community packages shipping this cycle: Terradart for defining cloud infrastructure in pure Dart, and vyuh_diagram_flutter for building interactive node diagrams programmatically in Flutter.

Learn more: AdMob banner recycling guide

Customer showcases

Teams worldwide continue to ship ambitious production apps with Flutter. Holafly unified its mobile apps into a single Flutter monorepo in three months to serve over 2 million monthly users and 25 million eSIMs. Knowunity pairs Flutter with Go and Gemini to support 8 to 10 million monthly active students. Buzz uses Flutter on iOS and Android to power an open-source workspace where people and AI agents collaborate side by side. The Google AI Edge team built the Eloquent and Foresight apps with Flutter to bring on-device AI inference to users on mobile and desktop.

The business value of Flutter

To help engineering leaders evaluate Flutter for upcoming roadmaps, our new 2026 whitepaper shares data-backed insights on engineering productivity, development velocity, and business return on investment.

Learn more: The business value of Flutter

Announcing Flutter RFCs

Flutter is adopting a public Request for Comments (RFC) process for technical designs and decision-making. RFCs provide a collaborative, transparent space to share ideas early, explore trade-offs, align with subsystem maintainers, and build architectural consensus before writing production code.

Learn more: Flutter Design Documents and flutter/rfc

Deprecations and breaking changes

Flutter 3.50 formally deprecates the coupled package:flutter/material.dart and package:flutter/cupertino.dart libraries, along with their flutter_localizations delegates. Android release builds also enforce stricter Intent validation and block debug engine flags, alongside four widget behavior updates. In package:material_ui, DropdownButtonFormField adds an explicit enabled property so you can disable dropdowns directly instead of passing null to the onChanged callback. Text containing soft hyphens now displays a visible hyphen automatically whenever a word wraps across lines. Inline WidgetSpan elements inside right-to-left text now appear in natural reading order instead of reversing unexpectedly. On mobile browsers, SafeArea now accounts for device notches and home indicators when viewport-fit=cover is set, keeping UI clear of screen cutouts.

Two framework cleanups also land in this release:

• The previously deprecated ignoringSemantics property is removed from IgnorePointer, AbsorbPointer, SliverIgnorePointer, and their render objects.
• computeDryBaseline on RenderProxyBox and other render objects that use RenderProxyBoxMixin now returns null when the child has no baseline instead of failing an assertion.

Learn more: Flutter breaking changes

Fresh from the oven and ready to upgrade

Thank you to every contributor across the community who filed issues, reviewed designs, and landed pull requests to help shape Flutter's next decade. Flutter 3.50 arrives fresh from the oven alongside Dart 3.14. Upgrade your SDK today to try everything in this release:

flutter upgrade

To explore every pull request included in this release, check out the Flutter 3.50 release notes and breaking changes.