: My Flutter course is now live! š UPDATE Check it out at fluttercrashcourse.com ā This morning I ate TWO breakfasts. I needed all āblog-writing brainpowerā I could muster. Thereās a lot to cover since so here we go. my last post Iām super excited because I can now officially resume writing blog posts about Flutter because Iām nearly ready to release my first full blown Flutter app to the iOS and Android storeāāāone or two more weeks to go! I refused to get distracted in the past few months and since I was writing this app in my free time. After dedicating years to learning iOS app dev in-depth, it killed me that I was alienating so many Android friends out there. Also, learning other cross platform frameworks at the time was super unattractive to me because of what was available. I havenāt been this excited about a technology since Ruby on Rails or Go. Even two years ago, going to for example, meetups showing off apps written with other cross platform mobile frameworks, I felt like they were either too hacky, unstable, had a poor developer experience, was hard to use, was overly complex or wouldnāt be around in other year or two to even use. So I just finished my first Flutter app and I feel I can safely invest much more of my time long term to the framework. Writing a Flutter app has been a litmus test and Flutter passed the test. Itās amazing to now be able to competently write apps for iOS and Android. I also love writing and scaling backends and is a UX so itās a powerful combination. my wife Irina This is going to be long blog post because there is a lot to cover: My Experience Porting an iOS app to Flutter Thoughts on Flutter Thus Far Recommendations to the Google team I decided to get my thoughts out quickly so I can get back to work on writing tutorials (and more apps!). 1. Porting an iOS App toĀ Flutter Since my last months ago, I felt that the logical next step was to really really get in depth with Flutter. Iām huge fan of tutorials with battle tested, end to end examples (think Digital Ocean or even Auth0 tutorials). End to end, detailed, high quality examples are what made me get hooked on new technologies in the past because I was able to really see near-production ready code and feel secure that I was implementing things the right way. So I wanted to do the same writing Flutter tutorials. post about Flutter So with those goals, I decided that the perfect app to cut my teeth on was to simply re-write an existing iOS app that I already had in the App Store. Steady Calendar ( , ), is a habit tracker that and I designed and developed while we were living Berlin a few years ago. Since then, it has been a product that made us hooked on how satisfying it was to design, implement and release a product that helps others improve their lives by adopting healthy habits. homepage Product Hunt my wife Irina I basically took a month or two, part time, to port this iOS app to Flutter so Iād be able to write awesome Flutter tutorialsāāāno pressure! Whatās cool is now I can cover the following in future tutorials because Iāve implemented them in the app: A āpre-loginā intro teaser. Facebook / email sign up and loginĀ . A grid view showing a calendar, where users can tap to highlight the day theyāve completed a goal. Cross-platform forms, where neither iOS nor Android users are alienated. Redux-style state management using Scoped Model Custom UIs with Stacks, Positioned elements, images and buttons. List views. Simple, multi-language internationalized UIs. Navigation bars that are cross-platform, again, not alientating iOS nor Android users. Globally styling widgets. Integration testing. Submitting the app to the Apple App Store. Submitting the app to the Google Play Store. 2. Thoughts on Flutter ThusĀ Far Although Iāve been writing backends and webapps for more than 17 years now, 4 of those years were heavily involved with iOS development and as of the past year at work Iāve needed to ramp up with React Native heavily (throw in a few React projects last year too). So hereās what stood out when learning Flutter: , support and community spirit is amazing. Everything from Stack Overflow, Google Groups to blog posts are high quality naturally because of the enthusiasm for Flutter. Google Engineers go out of their way to stay heavily involved in answering question on Google Groups and this makes for a great community. Theyāre super polite and professional when working with engineers from all backgrounds, something thatās hard to say for a lot of other companies out there. Thereās also a lively community where members are super active and provide really thoughtful answers. Documentation is fantastic. The libraries are very stable and with Flutter being based on Dart, a language thatās been around for years, learning is very easy as it is more established and battle tested. All around, great developer experience. The developer experience As expected, there there is less . Yet these are not deal breakers, at least in my experience. , just one exception was say, some third party integration with a popular analytics tool but nothing that a simple HTTP wrapper couldnāt take care of. availability of third party libraries written in Dart 95% of the features Iāve needed to use were there and available , something that the Flutter framework is heavily comprised of, is great for cranking out simple apps yet for professional, cross-platform apps, it will alienate iOS users. I cannot present Material Design widgets to my iOS users because it would make my app look alien to them. Flutter does indeed provide its own set of iOS widgets, but these still have a way to go in terms of comprehensiveness. Luckily, with the Steady app I wrote, most of the UI was already custom. But for things like forms, that was more of a challenge. So at the end of the day, the documentation, examples and overallFlutter SDK is heavily oriented around Material Design which is great but there needs to be more of a balance for folks like me. Material Design widgets . I have high standards too after being spoiled by leaning CocoaTouch / iOS back in the day. After diving through lots of Flutter code and judging by the experience of writing customer UIs, the . Sure, there are some widgets I really think are super overkill and can make the learning curve a bit more convoluted (i.e. the Center widget), but itās not a huge deal. After writing a real app one quickly starts to see a pattern of what the most critical widgets theyād probably be using on a regular basis (and hey, Iāll be covering that in my future tutorials). Developing custom UIs in Flutter was a breeze Google team really has their act together As an iOS user, taking a few months to write my original iOS app Steady Calendar, . I guess itās just because I always was super turned off by other cross platform mobile frameworks. If you take months of your spare time, lots of hard work developing something and realize you can run it on two major platforms, you will get hooked. This is probably not very insightful feedback for most people but I needed to share it anyway! Iāll never forget the sheer excitement of running it for the first time on a physical Android device but this hasnāt really anything to do with Flutter itself but more to do with getting into development for multiple platforms. When you plan out a Flutter app, make sure you have a good designer and a nice custom UI mocked up or be ready to write your Flutter app so that your code conditionally uses either Material Design or Cupertino widgets. In the former case though, this is less of a Flutter issue and more of a challenge writing cross platform apps, you need to make sure the UI is designed to be good looking for Android users and iOS users based on the conventions they are each used to. Writing cross platform apps will throw more design challenges your way . I love the stability and reliability I get vs using something like TypeScript or Flow. To put this into context, I have a bit of a React background and have been learning React Native heavily for my day job (heavily) for the past few months. Iāve also worked a lot with Objective-C and then Swift for years. Dart is a breath of fresh air because . Honestly, I think even high school freshmen can use Dart for basic programming. I just canāt believe how many I hear complaining theyād have to learn a new language, which for Dart would take between one or two hours or a day max. Dart is a pure pleasure to learn and use it doesnāt try to be overly complex and has a solid core library and packages Itās not perfect by any means, but in my own opinion, the learning curve, ease of use, tools available make it by far a nicer experience than other mobile frameworks Iāve used in the past. Flutter rocks. What Google ShouldĀ Do Google team members and friends should to in its Google Groups. This is a big plus and is what makes the framework standout in terms of approachability and support. The team supporting and cultivating the community are continue to provide thoughtful, friendly and responsive support really likable guys and have a good, positive attitude and thatās huge. Get a poll from community members to see which Widgets may simply not be useful. or deprecate them altogether. For example, the āCenterā widget is nice for a Hello, World container but I never understood it. Why canāt āContainerā, something thatās way more prevalent have a property to do the same thing? This is a super trivial example but I think thatās part of the reason why Go was so successful, because itās core library was simple and lean (and stayed lean). For the not so useful Widgets, just remove them from documentation tutorials Material Design is great to get going quickly or if youāre only building something for Android users. Iād never use Material Design in an iOS app. With that said, Iāve found Flutter to be a nicer, less complex developer experience than learning Swift and all the one million library features one has to know to write iOS apps nowdays. I think a lot of iOS users would love to learn Flutter if Flutter had just even a bit more iOS style widgets. Devote more focus on iOS users. on building realistic features and screens. Iād love to see more tutorials like this one: but also āend to endā ones, where an example of integration with a backend is shown. More tutorials https://flutter.io/get-started/codelab/ should be . Again, I donāt want to use the āMaterialAppā widget if Iām writing an iOS app. Theming seems tightly coupled to this and it should be more generic. Theming apps less focused on Material Design or pushing it so often. I realize Firebase really useful to get going fast and it helps bolster the approachability for new developers, but a significant amount of folks out there already have a backend ready or would not ever consider using Firebase. So I think more emphasis on how to work with simple web services and JSON would help. I had to read a lot of third party tutorials on this because I felt the documentation wasnāt realistic enough. I can elaborate when I write a future blog post about this. Less prevalence of Firebase in the documentation So far, Iām super happy with Flutter overall. Next, Iām going to consider re-writing another iOS I have in the app store, thatās more complex (Tinder-style photo swiping, real time chat, etc). www.brewswap.co So far, those are the main takeaways I can think of for now. Like any framework, there are a lot of quirks and learning curve issues but really overall, . Flutter is something I feel like I can really invest in and most importantly, really enjoy using Stay tuned for some initial Flutter tutorials and I hope I was able to give some insight for anyone considering making the investment in FlutterāāāIād say, go for it! For anyone with questions on insight, etc, itās better to just ping me on Twitter @seenickcode. : My Flutter course is now live! š UPDATE Check it out at fluttercrashcourse.com Happy Fluttering.
