Guide To Build Your First App With Flutter

Every new or an experienced Android developer must have heard about the latest release from Google, called as Flutter. This new and simple framework designed development kit helps in developing cross-platform native apps. With the increase in demand for mobile applications, we have various technologies and tools launched to ease the mobile apps development. Among the recent launch of SDK products, Google Flutter seems to be the best partner for app developers.

What is Flutter?

Flutter is a SDK for mobile apps launched by Google to craft high-quality native interface on both Android and iOS in record time. Available in beta version, Flutter is an open source product which can assist developers in building apps which is great in UX and features. The product is based on Google’s own Dart programming language, which is quite popular with the search engine giant. Know here: 5 Benefits of Flutter that Make It Start-up-Friendly

Flutter – its Features

This newbie kit is known for its various upgrades that dominate other available SDKs in the market.

• Fast Development

Flutter is built with a hot reload that helps developers to experiment quickly and easily, build advanced UIs, add additional features and fix bugs faster. Additionally, it helps to load applications in sub-seconds in emulators as well as on the mobile hardware.

• Design Beautiful UI

Enterprises using apps for products can delight their users with flutter’s inbuilt material design and Cupertino (iOS-flavour) widgets, smooth natural scrolling, rich motion APIs and also its platform awareness.

• Reactive Framework

It is very easy for developers to compose the UI with Flutter’s modern, reactive framework which comprises rich platform, layout and foundation widgets. And tough UI challenges can be solved with the flexible and powerful APIs for 2D, animations, effects, gesture and more.

Building your app

Install required tools. There are certain prerequisites to start building your app.

• Firstly, you need to install Git, Android Studio and Xcode. Android SDK to build Android applications and XCode for iOS apps.
• Secondly, install IntelliJ Idea. This is not mandatory but this is very much helpful while building your application. After installation, Dart and Flutter plugins should be added to it.
• Thirdly, Get Flutter. Then the official git repository of Flutter needs to be retrieved. Then, to the environment variables, a new path to the bin folder of the repository needs to be added.

And your flutter has been setup successfully.

Even it is fully installed, but you can re-verify the installation process from the official documentation.

Creating the first project

Let us open IntelliJ IDEA and create our first project. In the left sidebar, choose flutter.

Fill the following data with required values:

• Project Name:
• Description:
• Organization:
• Android Language:
• iOS Language:

Running the first app and Flutter discovery:

The IntelliJ IDEA creates main.dart (our main file in the application). The knowledge of dart isn’t mandatory for rest of the application.

Now an android or iOS emulator should be added to the application.

Now by clicking the run button, the application will run in the emulator. Also, a mobile can be added in the place of the emulator.

Flutter hot reloads:

The primary colour of the application by default in the main.dart file is blue. When the colour is changed to red, the hot reload allows applying the changes readily displaying the effects in the emulator.

Developing the Final App

The first thing to do is to develop the minimal application which means the minimum code to be able to run it. The UI is designed with the basic functionality. Run the application in flight mode.

Summary

Flutter isn’t something that is much hard to learn or use. Developers can have great experience in building apps for both Android and iOS.