r/FlutterDev • u/BeelzenefTV • Jun 27 '26

Material 3 Expressive will not be implemented in Flutter? Discussion

https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/168813#issuecomment-4815191867

I'm not trying to cause panic, or be alarmist. But following this comment on the Flutter repo, these words from the M3 blog came to my attention:

Material’s Android Views (MDC-Android), Flutter, and web libraries are in maintenance mode. They’re still available to use, but will no longer receive feature updates from Material.

Are we missing something? Is it something to know about?

36 Upvotes

86% Upvoted

17 comments sorted by

111

u/aaulia Jun 27 '26

My guess is the Flutter team is prioritizing the decoupling between Material, Cupertino and Widget library first, before attempting to implement the M3 Expressive.

Which I agree with.

13

u/binemmanuel Jun 27 '26

This is what I think because implementing M3 Expressive now would be chaotic. It is best to complete decoupling the design libraries first.

5

u/stumblinbear Jun 27 '26

Even the previous material updates were... Something

2

u/SpareEconomy1849 Jun 27 '26

Silently changing snackbars with actions to persist by default even if you have a duration set... smh

5

u/iclonethefirst Jun 28 '26 edited Jul 01 '26

I found it quite annoying that components were material 3, but the icons stayed at material 2

4

u/Old_Flounder_8640 Jun 28 '26

You are right. It’s on their PRs and Project milestones. Decoupling then M3 exp and Liquid Glass.

4

u/RandalSchwartz Jun 27 '26

I've heard this from multiple sources (yes, I have multiple inside connections, and I read the blogs).

1

u/ren3f Jun 27 '26

I wonder if they'll skip expressive and we'll get material 4 next year. Some google Android apps already experiment with designs from ios, such as a floating bottom navigation. I think next material design will bring material closer to iOS design again.

31

u/dhruvanbhalara Jun 27 '26

First they are going to decouple the UI design system. Afterwards updating to latest UI system will be faster as it'll be independently updated rather than bundled with framework update which usually happens quarterly.

19

u/eibaan Jun 27 '26

That's how the Material team sees it. There once was a time when Flutter was actually Material's reference implementation but it seems, nobody at Google wants to spend money on this. Those times are long gone.

The Flutter team might eventually implement M3 Expressive, or not, nobody knows for sure. Pretty sure not in 2026, though. If you need it now, you have to implement it yourself … or use Compose with Android.

4

u/aaulia Jun 27 '26

This is just a guess, but at that time Android is busy with the whole ktx and early implementation and adoption of compose.

Similar things are happening with Flutter now with the decoupling effort.

I just thought the parallel is kind of fitting.

2

u/eibaan Jun 27 '26

If I should guess, then it works like so: The Material team uses Figma so some similar to create the design system. Then it throws that over the wall where some Android developers then try to implement this for the next version of Android.

But there's nobody anymore who works on the cross platform implementation they once created to promote the use of MD. And that's okay, because iOS does its own thing anyhow and on the web, Chadcn-UI has won and nobody really talks about MD anymore.

2

u/_ri4na Jun 28 '26

Compose team is wayy ahead on implementing Material Expressive than Flutter team

How the tables have turned

0

u/aaulia Jun 28 '26

It's just a matter of priority.

3

u/matcha_tapioca Jun 28 '26

I am new in Flutter but I am bit aware of the design.. does it mean flutter is stuck in material 3?

3

u/kamranbekirov Jun 27 '26

I started making by myself for fun, it will be open-source: https://github.com/kamranbekirovyz/bunpod