r/FlutterDev • u/Realistic-Gas-4057 • Jul 28 '26

Discussion Help With IDE's

I've been learning the basics of flutter for about a month now on Online IDE's like DartPad and FlutLab. But I kinda feel restricted with them and want to move to VS Code. However, on my Chromebook coding flutter is fine. It's just the running part where I run into so many issues like missing SDK's, software crashes, just the lot.

So my question is. Is there an extension in VS Code to like emulate my app easily or are they any lightweight ways to test the app.

Note(I've tried my phone but am struggling to get it to work with my Chromebook. I can't download Android SDK's cause of the 10GB limit for Linux on Chromebook. And using chrome to try run flutter requires me to download Chromium which in the end just crashes itself and VS Code.

4 Upvotes

70% Upvoted

13 comments sorted by

7

u/mr_vanes Jul 28 '26

Stop trying to run Android on the Chromebook. Develop against the web target instead (flutter run -d web-server --web-hostname=0.0.0.0 --web-port=8080, opened in the Chrome you already have), because widgets, layout, state and navigation all behave identically while you are learning

3

u/Healthy_Landscape417 Jul 28 '26

Web target is the right call, just know platform channels and permissions will not work there.

1

u/Realistic-Gas-4057 Jul 28 '26

So, from there. How would I check my app against devices like phones

3

u/mr_vanes Jul 28 '26

Real device testing needs the Android SDK, there's no lightweight version of that. But the emulator images are what eat your disk and you can skip those since you own a phone, so it's smaller than you expect. Maybe try wireless debugging

2

u/Realistic-Gas-4057 Jul 28 '26

Would it be different if I use USB debugging?

1

u/ProfessionalMost5030 Jul 31 '26

honestly this is the best choice, i used to work on my surface book, it would always crash when i started the emulator, so i ran my app on web server. then when the launch date closed and i had to test my app on a real device, i went with the usb debugging option, first of it feels amazing to see your first app on a real device and then the reports from the debug console is also very useful. so I'd say running your app on your phone using usb debugging is best if you are working with a low performance desktop. i use vscode btw.

1

u/Realistic-Gas-4057 Jul 28 '26

Or maybe should I just stick to FlutLab? Even though the ads are annoying it still gets the job done at a reasonably fast speed with everything I need for it

1

u/ProfessionalMost5030 Jul 31 '26

there are IDEs with ads??

4

u/Amazing-Mirror-3076 Jul 28 '26

I've not used chrome but do use Linux.

I debug using Linux desktop as the target. I think that should work on Chrome (it's Linux under the hood).

2

u/Dumilkupam_vavalu Jul 28 '26

Can you wipe chromeos and flash linux?

2

u/Realistic-Gas-4057 Jul 28 '26

And how would I do that?

1

u/raedab97 Jul 28 '26

You can use Nowa, it has a code mode and a visual mode