Tool breaking change: deprecating `.flutter-plugins`

[Matan Lurey]

In 2019, the flutter tool introduced a new plugin dependency metadata (JSON) format, .flutter-plugins-dependencies, which replaces the older (flat-file) .flutter-plugins file as a strict upgrade with the ability to add more information over time.

To our knowledge, no modern tooling depends on this older format. 

When will the change happen?

We estimate that in N+1 stable releases (not the one yet to be released, but the following), i.e. the first stable release of 2025, we will stop (by default) generating .flutter-plugins and only generate .flutter-plugins-dependencies.

How to prepare for this change?

Our canonical (will be updated) instructions for upgrading are on our breaking changes site.

In short, most users will have to do nothing. Users with checked-in build scripts or tools (such as settings.gradle) may need to either re-generate the script (i.e. flutter create . --platforms android) or manually upgrade to dev.flutter.flutter-plugin-loader instead.

In an upcoming master channel release, it will be possible to enable a flag to check if your application depends on .flutter-plugins. When the flag is generally available, we will update the breaking changes site accordingly.