Flutter 3.16 Released: Material 3 Becomes the Default

What happened

Flutter 3.16 was released on November 15, 2023, according to the official Flutter documentation's archive of releases, and shipped alongside Dart 3.2. It was accompanied by both an announcement blog post and a technical What's new in Flutter 3.16 post from the Flutter team.

Material 3 by default

The headline change was that Material 3 became the default theme for Material Flutter apps. Unless developers explicitly opted out by specifying useMaterial3: false in their app's theme, their apps would look different after upgrading, adopting Google's newer Material Design system. This capped a long, incremental migration during which Material 3 had been available opt-in.

Impeller on Android

Flutter 3.16 made the Impeller runtime available for Android on Vulkan devices behind an --enable-impeller flag. Impeller is Flutter's modern rendering engine, designed to eliminate shader-compilation jank, and had already been the default on iOS; this release marked an important step toward bringing it to Android as well.

iOS app extensions and games toolkit

The release added the ability to include Apple iOS app extensions in a Flutter app when running on iOS. Alongside 3.16, the Flutter Casual Games Toolkit received a significant update with three new game code templates, new cookbook recipes and reorganised documentation. The release also came with articles on developing Flutter apps for large screens and DevTools extensions.

Why it mattered

Flutter 3.16 was a milestone in Flutter's design and rendering evolution. Making Material 3 the default modernised the look of the vast majority of Flutter apps, while extending Impeller to Android moved Flutter closer to a consistent, jank-free rendering engine across its two biggest mobile platforms.

Related on Skillo

See also: Flutter 3.0 and six-platform support, Flutter 3.24's Impeller and Flutter GPU.

Sources

• Flutter release notes archive (docs.flutter.dev)

Published date reflects the original event date (2023-11-15). This article is original Skillo editorial written from the sources above; facts were verified in September 2026.