Material Design 3 UX Not In The Flutter SDK

With the rumors that the Apple iOS foldable will be released in 2022 or 2023 it now becomes important to understand why specific UX patterns are not found in the Flutter SDK and where you might find them.

How We Got Here

You have to understand that the Flutter SDK is somewhat under-powered, in that there are several front-end SDK teams at Google. And, changes in Flutter SDK while fast can only do so much.

In fact, Flutter is only about 5 years old with it being started after they first played with doing sky widgets, see:

https://chromium.googlesource.com/external/github.com/flutter/engine/+/fitness_apk_2/sky/packages/sky/lib/widgets

The other aspect is that since the Flutter SDK covers all front-end devices, not every UX pattern is a good fit to find it included in the SDK. In fact, on purpose, the Flutter SDK team will often choose to let the Flutter Community come up with an UX flutter widget solution to a specific UX use case.

Foldables is one of the UX use cases where we only have about 5% of mobiles are foldables and which will not increase to 10% until iOS foldables appear in 2022 or 2023. Microsoft came up with a Flutter SDK contribution, then someone in the Flutter Community came up with an easier solution, re-using the same…