Flutter 3.44 Migration Guide: AGP 9, Swift Package Manager, and Breaking Changes

Android migration: AGP 9 and built-in Kotlin

Flutter 3.44 introduces support for Android Gradle Plugin 9 and shifts toward built-in Kotlin configuration.

In existing projects, this may require updating Gradle configuration following Flutter’s migration guide: Flutter built-in Kotlin migration guide.

In practice, the migration is mostly mechanical, but it highlights an important point: parts of the ecosystem are still adapting to these changes as even some plugins maintained by the Flutter team are still in migration (follow the progress here). This problem also affects several other open source plugins maintained by the community (like firebase_remote_config, device_info_plus, sentry_flutter, among others).

The Flutter team added backward compatibility, but it’s expected to be removed in the near future, so make sure to report an issue on any plugin you use that’s still not migrated, so everything keeps building without problems.

If the project or any plugin it uses are still not migrated, add the following flags to gradle.properties so it can keep building.

Swift Package Manager becomes the default for Apple platforms

One of the most significant changes in Flutter 3.44 is the switch to Swift Package Manager (SPM) as the default dependency manager for iOS and macOS, replacing CocoaPods as the primary setup mechanism for new projects.

However, plugin support is still in transition. Similar to built-in Kotlin, many plugins already support SPM, but not all have fully migrated yet (like permission_handler), so make sure to report it to each plugin author.

Analyzer issues with Swift Package Manager integration

A side effect of the new SPM-based workflow is that generated plugin code may appear under:

This can cause the Dart analyzer to report a large number of false positive errors, as it attempts to index generated or duplicated source files with incorrect paths. A temporary workaround is to exclude all those files from the analysis_options.yaml file:

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If needed, you can follow the status of this issue here.

Other notable changes in Flutter 3.44

Beyond the migration-related changes, Flutter 3.44 also introduces several broader platform improvements:

• AI-assisted development tools: Agentic Hot Reload via the Flutter MCP server, allowing external agents to trigger hot reload workflows automatically.
• Android performance improvements: Hybrid Composition++ (HCPP) for improved native view embedding performance delegating the layer compositing to the operating system.
• Framework evolution: Material and Cupertino libraries are being frozen and prepared for extraction into separate packages. This is part of a longer-term effort to decouple framework components from the core SDK.
• Desktop and platform expansion: Experimental improvements to multi-window desktop support.

Conclusion

Most changes in Flutter 3.44 are related to platform tooling, build systems, and dependency management. The upgrade itself is still relatively straightforward in most projects, but the ecosystem is clearly in a transition phase. For developers, this means most applications will continue to build thanks to backward compatibility, but migration warnings and plugin maintenance status are becoming increasingly relevant when planning upgrades.

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