Flutter is known for its cross-platform support for iOS and Android applications. Now, it has expanded to more platforms. We've evaluated Flutter for Web previously — it allows us to build apps for iOS, Android and the browser from the same codebase. Not every web application makes sense in Flutter, but we think Flutter is particularly suited for cases like progressive web apps, single-page apps and converting existing Flutter mobile apps to the web. Flutter had already supported WebAssembly (WASM) as a compilation target in its experimental channel, which means it was under active development with potential bugs and performance issues. The most recent releases have made it stable. The performance of a Flutter web application compiled to its WASM target is far superior to its JavaScript compilation target. The near-native performance on different platforms is also why many developers initially choose Flutter.
So far, Flutter has primarily supported native iOS and Android applications. However, the Flutter team's vision is to support building applications on every platform. Flutter for Web is one step in that direction — it allows us to build apps for iOS, Android and the browser from the same codebase. It has been available for over a year now on the "Beta" channel, but with the recent Flutter 2.0 release, Flutter for Web has hit the stable milestone. In the initial release of web support, the Flutter team is focusing on progressive web apps, single-page apps and expanding existing mobile apps to the web. The application and framework code (all in Dart) are compiled to JavaScript instead of ARM machine code, which is used for mobile applications. Flutter’s web engine offers a choice of two renderers: an HTML renderer, which uses HTML, CSS, Canvas and SVG, and a CanvasKit renderer that uses WebAssembly and WebGL to render Skia paint commands to the browser canvas. A few of our teams have started using Flutter for Web and like the initial results.
