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

Plugins to help with your app support

Finally, in this chapter, I wanted to make a special mention of plugins that help you support your app once it is in the wild. We saw the Crashlytics plugin earlier, and it cannot be said strongly enough that any live app must have a way to report crashes. On Android, there are so many different devices by so many different manufacturers that it is impossible to test across all of them.

Let's look at some other plugins that will make your life easier.

App version

Although most people have auto-update set on their device's settings, some people choose to manually install updates. If someone has an issue and sends you details, you really want an easy way to see which version of the app they are running.

The package_info_plus plugin is perfect for this. It will read the information from your pubspec.yaml file and make it available for you to surface in a widget. Adding this information to your app's settings page is a must...