Category: Development

Today at Mobile World Congress, Google introduced Flutter, their new cross platform mobile SDK.  The new development tool will allow for developers to create native UI frameworks for both Android and iOS that are native to each platform.

The beauty of Flutter is that it comes packing its own rendering engine and framework which, in essence, bypasses the native UI frameworks in both platforms.  This is not something new for developers, especially game developers who have used different rendering engines.  This allows for significant performance increases (particularly on Android).  When you compile the app with the available Android and iOS SDKs, you get the appropriate app & framework for the respective platform.

Having had a Google Home in my house for most of this week, there are some things that need improvement (I’ll cover that in more detail in my review coming up next week).  One of those areas is app integration.  There are just a handful of apps that work with the help of Google Assistant and Google Home.  For it to be successful, this has to change and it likely will starting next month.  Google has announced that the Google Assistant Actions API will be opening up to developers starting next month.  That means developers will be able to enhance their apps to work with Assistant and, in turn, Home, through three different action models.  First, there is the Direct Actions.  This is designed for straightforward requests for things like home automation, etc.  As the name suggests, it is something you direct your app to do as it interacts with Assistant.

Read on for more details