What’s New in Flutter 3.29?

ure! Here’s a friendlier, more conversational rewrite of your Flutter 3.29 update summary—like you’re chatting with fellow devs over coffee:

🎉 Flutter 3.29 is here – and it’s packed with great updates to help you build better, faster, and more polished apps. With contributions from 104 awesome community members, this release brings smoother performance, updated widgets, and nicer tooling – all aimed at making your Flutter dev life even better.

Let’s take a look at what’s new!

Contents

🎨 Material Design 3 Enhancements

Flutter’s Material 3 (M3) support keeps getting better.

New FadeForwardsPageTransitionsBuilder: transitions now fade + slide, like the latest Android behavior.
Progress indicators (Circular and Linear) have been updated to M3 style—you can toggle between old and new.
Slider got a design refresh, plus improvements to TabBar, RangeSlider, and DropdownMenu for better usability.

✍️ Text Selection – More Control!

You can now track text selection events more closely using the new SelectionListener and SelectableRegion widgets. Super handy for building custom text editors or selection-aware UIs.

♿ Accessibility Improvements

Flutter 3.29 makes apps more screen reader–friendly:

Form fields will only announce the first validation error (less overwhelming for users).
Dropdown menus now announce labels correctly when a screen reader is active.

🌐 Web Improvements

Wasm just got simpler.
No more fiddling with custom headers—basic wasm support works out of the box (still single-threaded for now).
Also: image loading is faster, and WebGL/CORS issues are smoother.

🔥 Impeller is the New Default

Big shift here: Impeller is now the go-to rendering engine for most platforms.

Android: Improved Vulkan support, and if Vulkan isn’t available, Impeller falls back to OpenGLES.
iOS: Skia is gone. Impeller is the standard now—smaller apps, better performance.

New goodies in Impeller:

BackdropGroup speeds up multiple backdrop filters.
ImageFilter.shader lets you apply custom shaders—great for visual effects and performance.

🧵 Dart Threading Tweaks

On iOS and Android, Dart now runs directly on the main thread, instead of a separate UI thread. This change helps with smoother platform interactions and better performance. Win-win.

🛠️ DevTools + IDE Updates

The inspector is better than ever:

Widget tree is cleaner and easier to read.
New properties panel is more intuitive.
Real-time updates now happen during hot reloads and navigation—so helpful!
Logging now includes severity levels, isolate info, and more debug context.

⚠️ Breaking Changes & Deprecations

Some heads-up items:

Deprecated packages like and will be unsupported after April 30, 2025. Time to look for alternatives.
Old Gradle plugin method is being retired—update your Android builds!
HTML renderer for web is gone—you now get more control over image rendering instead.

🎯 Wrapping Up

Flutter 3.29 is a solid step forward: faster performance, more polished UI, smoother dev experience, and better accessibility. Whether you’re building for mobile, web, or desktop, this release has something to make your workflow smoother.

Big thanks to the Flutter community for pushing things forward—especially the 104 contributors who made this release awesome.

Go ahead and update your Flutter SDK to 3.29. Try out the new features, explore the upgrades, and keep building great apps! 🚀

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