Book Image

Flutter for Beginners - Second Edition

By : Thomas Bailey, Alessandro Biessek
Book Image

Flutter for Beginners - Second Edition

By: Thomas Bailey, Alessandro Biessek

Overview of this book

There have been many attempts at creating frameworks that are truly cross-platform, but most struggle to create a native-like experience at high performance levels. Flutter achieves this with an elegant design and a wealth of third-party plugins, making it the future of mobile app development. If you are a mobile developer who wants to create rich and expressive native apps with the latest Google Flutter framework, this book is for you. This book will guide you through developing your first app from scratch all the way to production release. Starting with the setup of your development environment, you'll learn about your app's UI design and responding to user input via Flutter widgets, manage app navigation and screen transitions, and create widget animations. You'll then explore the rich set of third party-plugins, including Firebase and Google Maps, and get to grips with testing and debugging. Finally, you'll get up to speed with releasing your app to mobile stores and the web. By the end of this Flutter book, you'll have gained the confidence to create, edit, test, and release a full Flutter app on your own.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
1
Section 1: Introduction to Flutter and Dart
6
Section 2: The Flutter User Interface – Everything Is a Widget
10
Section 3: Developing Fully Featured Apps
14
Section 4: Testing and App Release

Chapter 9: Popular Third-Party Plugins

In the previous chapter, we learned about what a plugin is and how it is used, and we experimented with our first plugin.

Flutter has a rich set of Flutter plugins, and sometimes it can be hard to know where to start from; you don't know what you don't know! This chapter will highlight some of the most popular plugins and give an overview of their uses.

We will start this chapter by looking into the Firebase plugins. Firebase is a set of services available on Google Cloud that you can use to create apps with advanced features. This includes authenticating users, storing data, sending push notifications, and analyzing app usage, among many other features.

We will then look at how to use Google Places for map and location information. Many apps have address lookups or show locations on a map, and the Google Places plugins really help here.

Next, we will look at plugins that exercise the capabilities of the device the app is...