For Flutter enthusiasts worldwide, 2025 was an exciting year, not just in the world of mobile development but for the Flutter ecosystem as a whole. As 2026 approaches, we at Shape take a look back at this year’s attention-grabbing releases and the roadmap for what comes next.
The first big highlight of the year was in April, with the release of the annual Flutter roadmap, which has been a tangible testament to Google’s ongoing commitment to transparency since the first roadmap in 2020.
The roadmap laid out ambitious goals and priorities that the Flutter team would be working towards over the course of the year. These ranged from performance upgrades to developer tooling improvements.
The first major shake-up to be delivered from the roadmap was the release of Impeller 2.0, Flutter’s next-gen rendering engine, which is now in use as the default renderer for both iOS and Android, with web support on the way.
Impeller has been specifically designed to make the most out of your device’s graphic resources and reduce the workload on the CPU, all while streamlining frame rendering. The result of these upgrades means that Impeller 2.0 can boast near-native performance to Flutter applications, smoother animations, and highly responsive UIs, even with a heavy graphical demand.
Flutter’s DevTools saw a major upgrade as well, with a more powerful widget inspector letting developers explore and debug complex widget trees in real time. Hot reload got even hotter, with a substantial improvement to rebuild and restart times, even on web and desktop targets, which is what a lot of Shapes clients are using at the moment.
However, Performance wasn’t the only focus of the roadmap. The Flutter team also takes social responsibility seriously, committing to inclusivity and sustainability goals. The roadmap emphasises the Flutter team’s commitment to trimming down app sizes and optimising resource usage without compromising on startup times, all of which are aimed at creating a smaller, more sustainable app footprint.
Accessibility has seen a significant upgrade as well. Screen readers now receive much richer semantic information from widgets, which allows users with visual impairments to navigate apps with greater clarity. This improvement extends to common UI components like buttons, toggles, and sliders. Previously, these had to be customised manually by developers to ensure they were communicating state, as well as functionality to assistive tech. With the 2025 accessibility upgrades, these components are now working out of the box to ensure screen readers and other assistive tools are as useful as possible for the end users across all platforms.
Combined, these enhancements mean that Flutter applications are meeting accessibility standards and helping to create a more inclusive and usable tech environment for both users and developers globally. Making Flutter an easier choice for our government clients, where accessibility is of high importance, as they are building products to be used by entire countries in some cases and have to provide solutions available to everyone.
The story doesn’t stop there, however. 2026 looms large on the horizon, and with it comes increasing whispers of Flutter’s 4.0 release. While nothing concrete on that front has been released, the roadmap details features that we can expect to see released while we wait.
The Impeller upgrades have put Flutter in a very strong position to expand beyond the traditional mainstays of phone, tablet and desktop applications. We could very likely be seeing Flutter used in embedded displays. From smart thermostats to petrol pumps, and even industrial controllers could be running Flutter in the very near future. This is because Flutter’s near unique selling point is its versatility. Different device classes have historically needed different UI stacks, resulting in a fragmented, difficult-to-maintain codebase. Flutter does away with that, instead having one single codebase that compiles down to efficient machine code. This, combined with the upgrades delivering fast GPU-accelerated animation and Impeller’s rendering, makes Flutter a very viable choice for embedded hardware and IoT integrations.
This is going even further. Vendors like BMW and Toyota have been experimenting with Flutter for the infotainment (in-vehicle screens). While mostly in internal R&D stages for most projects, this move signals a shift away from the established C++ UI frameworks of old, and towards a more modern and certainly a more developer-friendly approach.
It’s important to note that these upgrades, while certainly exciting, are not mainstream yet, nor are they likely to be in the very near future. But just as a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, you still need a roadmap to get there, and Shape is still committed to the Flutter ecosystem and will be ready to use it in any project where cross-platform and adaptability are important.
