Book Image

Flutter for Beginners - Third Edition

By : Thomas Bailey, Alessandro Biessek
5 (2)
Book Image

Flutter for Beginners - Third Edition

5 (2)
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, solidifying its status as 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. You’ll start with the basics of cross-platform development frameworks, specifically Flutter. You’ll then explore the Dart programming language which is the foundation of the Flutter framework. Next, you’ll get a feel for Flutter and how to create your first app, followed by an exploration of the various popular plugins that supplement the Flutter framework. Finally, you’ll explore testing and app release, including some common glitches that you may experience. By the end of this book, you’ll be well-equipped to create and release a basic Flutter app along with gaining a solid understanding of the Flutter framework and Dart language.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
1
Part 1:Learning the Core Concepts
6
Part 2:Building a Basic Flutter App
11
Part 3:Turning a Simple App into an Awesome App
15
Part 4:Testing and Releasing Your App

Plugins to help with your app support

Finally, 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

While the majority of individuals have automatic app updates enabled in their device settings, some prefer manual installation or may be using an older app version due to factors such as limited internet connectivity. If someone encounters an issue with your app and provides you with details, it is crucial to have a convenient method of determining the specific app version they are using.

The package_info_plus plugin is perfect for this. It will read the information from your pubspec...