My take on Flutter in 2026
Maturity, AI Integrations, and the Future of Dart
Flutter was released by Google in 2017, and since then it has seen tremendous growth and adoption (or it has already decade, if we take into consideration that work on it started in 2015).
I am a little bit tired of reading, which framework is the best for cross-platform development or which one is going to die.
Neither is true for Flutter or any other framework as all of them have their pros and cons. Your skill set, colleagues, requirements and many other factors play important role in choosing the right tool for the job. Do not sell yourself short by choosing “the most popular” or “the trendiest” framework.
In this article, I would like to share my thoughts on where Flutter is heading in 2026 based on current trends, the community and my personal experience.
Maturity and Stability
It depends on who you ask, you will find different answers.
For me, Flutter is mature for production use for most use cases. It is stable for building complex applications that require high performance and custom UI.
But you will find people obsessing about its imperfections and missing features. For example, how some components are not rendered properly on certain platforms or how some plugins are not maintained.
Flutter Widgets to Packages
Flutter is now going through the cleansing phase, where Material and Cupertino widgets are being moved to separate packages. Flutter will support platform-agnostic widgets in the core framework, while platform-specific widgets will be maintained separately.
So you will not have to wait for months for a fix in the core framework, but you can update only the package that you need.
If you have your own custom widgets, I would start getting ready for it and start removing mentions of Material or Cupertino widgets in your codebase to the extent possible.
At least move to widgets.dart as much as possible and others keep in Material or Cupertino imports only where absolutely necessary. It will take you less time to refactor it, because it will only require one package import.
It is a good thing that the Flutter team is doing this, because it will allow them to focus on the core framework and make it more stable.
AI Integrations and Widget Previews in IDEs
This combination might be weird, but let me explain.
MCP support for Flutter and Dart is experimental, but it is there, and it actually helps agents to interact with the codebase.
I regularly see my Copilot to invoke analyzer, tests, interact with running code, or use pub.dev to find packages.
It is still in the beginning, but I can see these integrations getting better and better in the future.
For example, Antigravity IDE from Google uses an embedded browser to let the agent observe the results of its actions visually. Flutter introduced Widget previews, which also render widgets in the IDE in the browser.
Combining these two features, we can expect that in the future AI agents will be able to see the rendered widgets in the IDE and interact with them. This will bring new possibilities for AI-assisted development, where agents can not only write code but also see the results and make adjustments accordingly.
This is unconfirmed speculation, but it makes sense to me that Google would leverage its own technologies to improve developer experience in Flutter.
Dart
Dart is becoming more and more capable of handling tasks. Here is a list of improvements that I hav found most useful recently:
- Null-aware elements: Simpler collection handling.
- Enhanced type inference: Significantly reduces boilerplate.
- Dot shorthands: Cleaner enum and constructor syntax.
- Pattern matching: It is fully practical for production use.
- Memory management: Improvements make applications feel lighter.
- AOT compilation: It is noticeably faster.
I use plenty of code generation in my projects to reduce boilerplate code and improve developer experience. For example: freezed, json_serializable, injectable, mockito and many others.
With improvements to build_runner and other tools, the generation is faster. With the switch to AOT compilation of these tools, the performance will become even better.
Dart interoperability with C/C++ through FFI is also improving, making it easier to integrate native libraries when needed.
I am looking forward to seeing if we will be able to fully replace Java/Kotlin/Swift/Objective-C code with Dart in mobile applications in the future. There are still some limitations, but we can navigate Dart to native classes and methods with YAML definitions, and it will generate the necessary bindings.
In the end, there could be a world where we write everything in Dart and use FFI to access native functionality when absolutely necessary, but that is still some time away.
Dart for Backend
Dart backend frameworks are also emerging and improving.
Here are a couple of examples:
- ServerPod - Full-featured backend framework with ORM, authentication, real-time capabilities and more. It has been for a while, and it is getting traction now.
- Dart Frog - Minimalistic and flexible framework for building RESTful APIs and web applications
Lately, even Cloud Functions for Firebase has started to add support for Dart, which is a big step forward for Dart on the backend.
Web and AI Integrations
As you could notice, web support in Flutter was improved significantly in the last year.
Now the hot reload works for web applications as well, it is lighter and faster. WASM support is improving overall, and we can expect to see whole Flutter web running in WASM in the future.
Web can now use a separate YAML file for configurations of host, port, certificates, headers and more.
Another periphery for improvement is accessibility, where Flutter can expose accessibility DOM for screen readers, mimicking the actual canvas structure.
*SEO and other web features are still missing, and due to the fact of how Flutter renders web applications, it is unlikely that we will see them anytime soon, but let’s see how the web support will evolve in 2026.
The single reason why all this is happening is the rise of AI applications. If you use the Gemini web version, the whole application is written in some sort of regular web technologies, but the results with interactive UI are actually done in Flutter.
Flutter is actually used for the NotebookLM app as well, and it is becoming obvious that Flutter is being picked for all the new AI endeavors from Google and I think we will see more and more AI applications built with Flutter in the future.
GenUI is another example, where you can create your own widget catalog and give it to AI to build an application UI based on the query given by the user. Suddenly, the UX can be driven by AI, and Flutter is the perfect framework for it.
All of these are actual use cases for Google itself, so we can expect that they will continue to invest into Flutter and Dart to make it better for AI applications.
Conclusion
Flutter is maturing and stabilizing as a framework. AI integrations and improvements in Dart are making it more capable of handling complex tasks.
Flutter is definitely not dead, and it is not perfect, but it is a solid choice for cross-platform development in 2026, and it will continue to evolve and improve in the future.
Looking forward to seeing what 2026 brings for the Flutter and Dart ecosystem!
On personal note, this is my last article this year. Thank you for reading! Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to all of you!
Socials
Thanks for reading this article!
For more content like this, follow me here or on X or LinkedIn.
