"Great Thread Merge" in Flutter

Hey everyone,

If you're a Flutter dev like me, you've probably spent some time wrestling with platform channels. You know, that whole song and dance you have to do just to get a piece of information from the native side, like the battery level. It works, but it can feel a bit clunky, right?

Well, the Flutter team just put out a video about something they're calling "The Great Thread Merge," and trust me, it's a bigger deal than it sounds. It's a huge change to how Flutter works under the hood, and it’s going to make our lives a lot easier.

The Old Way

Think of it like this. In the past, your Dart code (your app's UI) was running in one room. The native platform code (the stuff specific to Android or iOS) was running in a completely separate room.

If your Dart code needed something from the native side, it had to send a message over, wait for a reply, and deal with all that async/await stuff using a Future. This is what platform channels do. It's like shouting through a wall to the person in the next room. It's slow, and sometimes things get lost in translation.

The New Way

With the thread merge, Flutter is basically tearing down the wall between those two rooms.

It's moving our Dart code onto the same main thread that the native platform code runs on.

So what does this mean for us?

• Way Simpler Code: Remember needing a whole StatefulWidget and setState just to show the battery percentage? The video shows how after the merge, you can just call a function directly in your build method. No Future, no state management, nothing. it's just one line. How cool is that?

• Less Native Code to Write: Because talking to the native side is so much cheaper and faster now, we can write more of our logic in Dart. i really hate having to write the same feature twice – once in Kotlin for Android and again in Swift for iOS. This change means we can avoid that more often.

• Better Performance: Fewer "thread hops" (jumping between rooms) means things are just more efficient. This should lead to smoother and faster apps.

Who Needs to Pay Attention?

For most of us building regular Flutter apps, this is just good news. We'll start seeing simpler plugins and a better development experience over time.

& i think, If you're a plugin author, you do need to be a little careful. If you were using the platform thread to do heavy background work, you'll need to move that stuff to a proper Isolate now. Otherwise, you might freeze the app's UI.

My Thoughts

Honestly, i'm super excited about this. It's one of those deep-down changes that fixes a ton of small annoyances we've all faced. It shows the Flutter team is serious about making native integration as smooth as possible.

This is a huge win for Flutter's future!