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

Tracking app usage and crashes

When your app is in production use, it can be very hard to know how the app is being used and whether your users are encountering issues. Knowing when there are issues with app usage or crashes at the earliest opportunity is especially important when your app is released on mobile stores because the update cycle can take days.

There are two Firebase tools that are great for tracking this information, Crashlytics and Google Analytics, and we looked at how to set them up in Chapter 10, Popular Third-Party Plugins. In this chapter, let’s take a look at some of the output that is generated and how that can help us as we improve our app.

Crashlytics

Every time your app has an unexpected crash, or you specifically send a crash report from within your code, Crashlytics will receive that information and display it on the dashboard.

This can be especially useful if you have an asynchronous operation that doesn’t directly impact the running...