Should we flutter?

You probably heard of Flutter, "yet another crossplatform system". It claims to provide a fast and fun way to create high quality apps. Should you or your Android team consider giving it a try?

Let me spoil the answer: It depends.

I will walk you through some questions and considerations, introducing Flutter concepts as we go. You'll hear from our experience building a first client's app with Flutter. Hopefully, in the end, you'll have your answer whether Flutter is an option for your team and project.

Transcript

1. ? ? Should we flutter? Miriam Busch, CTO at Karlmax Berlin @miphoni
2. ? ? The quiz
3. #1 Do you actually care about shipping to that other platform? Totally. Nice, but optional. Nope. 40 50 0
4. Redundancy Building the „same“ thing twice?
5. What is a Flutter app? • Your app written in Dart • Bundled with the Flutter system • Compiled to native machine code
6. #2 What is your design approach? Material Brand-specific / custom Native per Platform 20 30 -30 (*) (*) Adjust accordingly.
7. How does Flutter run UI code? • Platform components are not used. • UI is rendered by Flutter’s own rendering engine. • Flutter rendering is fast. • Flutter offers: Material widgets, „Cupertino“ rewrite of iOS UI, customizable basic widgets
8. #3 Does your app need partial screen Google maps or partial screen web views? Yes No -100 0
9. Fallback to fullscreen Android Activities?
10. #4 Is your app heavily relying on platform services? Heavily Little None -50 -10 20
11. Platform-specific code • Call platform-specific code via a message passing interface. • Google and 3rd party plugins: SQLite, BLE, Audio Playback, In-App Billing, Firebase…
12. #5 Do you strive to always provide the best platform integration and adopt new OS features early? Yes No, but would like to. Actually no. -70 … make your call now … 0
13. The latest and greatest of Android? • Dynamic Delivery? • Slices & App Actions • Modularization? ☹ • Customizable Material
14. #6 Are you bored or annoyed by Android because… XML Layout is tedious? Animations are hard? Build times… 30 30 30
15. Back to coding your UI return new Scaffold(appBar: new AppBar( title: new Text(widget.title), ), body: new Center( child: new Column( mainAxisAlignment: MainAxisAlignment.center, children: <Widget>[ new Text('You have pushed the button this many times:',), new Text(‚$_counter', style: Theme.of(context).textTheme.display1,), ], ), ), floatingActionButton: new FloatingActionButton( onPressed: _incrementCounter, tooltip: 'Increment', child: new Icon(Icons.add), ), );
16. „You never have to say no to your designer any more.“ → Youtube: Fluttery - „The Flutter challenge“ Custom widgets & animations
17. Stateful hot reload
18. #7 Where does your team come from? Java Kotlin 30 -40
19. Dart 2 •Object-oriented •As of Dart2: Strongly typed •Easy to learn •No non-optionals!
20. #8 Do you have time & flexibility to try something new? Yes!!! No. 30 -100
21. Redo from start?
22. „It depends.“ ? ? < -20 … > 20 Android Undecided Try Flutter?!
23. Related at droidcon Berlin’18 • Dylan Drost: Dart: I’m your Flutter (Workshop) • Brian Egan: Build a reactive Flutter app! • Tomek Polanski: I convinced Groupon to Flutter. Do the same with your company. • Matthias Friedrich: Production Flutter’ing • Alternative for sharing business logic: Kotlin Multiplatform • Tobias Heine, Said Tahsin Dane: (Code) Sharing is caring
24. Credits images • The Android droid logo is used under the terms of Creative Commons 3.0 - https://developer.android.com/distribute/marketing-tools/brand- guidelines • Erol Ahmed - https://unsplash.com/@erol • Arisa Chattasa - https://unsplash.com/@golfarisa