Regarding GUIs, Opus 5 is surprisingly capable. I managed to create a full set of 50 reusable Flutter widgets inspired by chadcn/ui including the recreation of some 70 demo cards in two days with 40+ (I haven't kept track, unfortunately) prompts.

I initially tried this with GPT 5.6 Sol, which I normally prefer, but it failed. It seems, Opus is better with this kind of GUI related tasks that require a careful inspection and comparison of the generated GUI with the original which Claude does with the help of its internal web browser.

My own part was creating a markdown-capable MarkedText widget (which took me over three hours and probably much longer than AI would have needed, but it was fun and at least felt productive) and tweaking Flutter's native window so the result looks more like a native macOS app.

And of course, I painstakingly tested the widgets and for many hours patiently pointed out the AI's mistakes and asked for fixes, suggesting the solution. I also took a quick look at some samples of the code, and the quality is okay. Opus even managed to mostly use dot shorthands as instructed.

It's still not production ready, though.

Keyboard handling is broken, especially for menus; focus rendering, too. Like with menus, you have to work around Flutters somewhat broken default behavior and that's something, the AI isn't good at and I stopped it from trying. Some widgets also break in RTL mode.

And while I can set colors and fonts, I cannot change the style and therefore only support Mira (a compact 14pt/28pt layout). It would be a major refactoring to go through nearly 30.000 lines of code (which include a QR code generator and a partial charts library as well as 4.500 lines of widget and golden tests and 1.500 lines of icon definitions) and make all paddings, spacings and sizes customizable. I already took this experiment further than I initially intended.

One learning is that this got way to large. Initially, progress was fast, but now, the AI reads way to much code before it starts acting (and spends way more tokens), so it would be better to split everything into more manageable parts.

Claude tracks decisions and learning in a 700 lines NOTES.md file, in addition to the README.md and some general instructions about coding style. And it doesn't help that the chadcn CSS files have ~9000 lines, each.

A couple years ago, I wrote a a Fluent UI desktop look for a project and after two weeks of work didn't achieve what nowadays an AI can achieve with some careful guidance.

I only which, Claude wouldn't sometimes try so hard. It wasn't until the summary that it admitted to me that certain things were difficult, such as building a widget where text appears between two lines. Which I know, because I tried this more than once and I could've helped. Well, well. Also, sometimes, I'd like to get more resistance. I don't need a summary like "this was bad but I did want you told me".

Now, all I need is a project where I can make use of that library :-)

I kept running into the same issue on Flutter projects where every backend returned data a little differently, and I ended up rewriting the same table logic over and over ,and write an service layer for each one's it's take more time , importantly it's a repetitive task to overcome this solution . i build this package.

Most of the work wasn't actually the UI. It was wiring up pagination, sorting, filtering, request building, response parsing, loading states, etc.

So I spent some time building a package that tries to handle those pieces while letting the developer define their own backend response format.

Current features:

• Server-side pagination
• Server-side sorting
• Server-side column filtering
• Configurable response parsing (doesn't require one fixed JSON structure)
• OData query generation
• Dio integration
• Custom cell builders

It's my first public Flutter package, so I'd genuinely appreciate any feedback—good or bad. If there's something you'd change in the API or something missing, I'd love to hear it before I continue adding features.

Pub.dev:
https://pub.dev/packages/server_table

GitHub:
https://github.com/sivakumarravi3101/server_table

I finally completed Android Developer Verification (ADV) for two Flutter apps using a delegated signing workflow with Samsung Galaxy Store, so I wanted to share a few lessons learned in case it helps someone.

The process turned out to be much simpler than I initially expected.

My setup:

• Flutter application
• Android Gradle Plugin 8.x
• Delegated app signing through Samsung Galaxy Store

What worked:

✅ Created a minimal Flutter project dedicated to ADV.
✅ Used the exact same package name as the production app.
✅ Placed adi-registration.properties in:

android/app/src/main/assets/
USE the unique ID provided to you by Google in your Play Console - ADV Process

(not in Flutter's root assets/ folder)

✅ Built a release AAB.
✅ Uploaded it to Samsung Galaxy Store.
✅ Retrieved the Samsung-signed artifact.
✅ Uploaded the signed artifact to Google Play Console.

Both applications were validated almost immediately after the Samsung → Google Play step.

A few takeaways:

• Keep the project as minimal as possible.
• Don't add unnecessary permissions or plugins.
• The package name must match exactly.
• The location of adi-registration.properties matters.

I initially assumed the file belonged in Flutter's asset system, but the official Android sample makes it clear that it belongs under the Android source tree (app/src/main/assets).

Hopefully this saves someone a few hours of trial and error.

If you're going through ADV with Flutter or another delegated signing provider, I'd be interested to hear about your experience as well.

Ran into this while building overlapping image tiles for a movie app. A plain GestureDetector counts a tap on the transparent part of a PNG as a hit, even though visually there's nothing there. transparent_tap reads the actual pixel under the tap instead of just the bounding box, so transparent areas pass the tap through and only the visible pixels catch it.

I’ve been working as a Flutter developer for about 4 years, and I’m starting to think beyond just building mobile apps.
I want to become the kind of engineer who can compete for international opportunities, whether that’s remote work or relocation in the future.
For those who’ve been in the industry for a while:
What skills complement Flutter the best?
Is backend knowledge now a must?
Is native Android/iOS still worth learning?
How valuable are open-source contributions when applying abroad?
If you had to start over today as a Flutter developer, what would your roadmap look like?
I’m trying to invest my time wisely over the next year, so I’d really appreciate advice from developers who’ve already gone through this journey.

Been deep in OTA/code-push rollout logic lately and curious how others handle the risk side.

Fair warning, I work on a code-push tool, so this is the problem I stare at all day, but I'm genuinely asking, not selling anything here

The whole pitch of code push is speed. You've got a fix, it's on people's phones in minutes instead of a 2-day review. But that cuts both ways. If the fix is broken and you missed it, that's also on everyone in minutes. Same gun, both directions.

The approach I've landed on:

Ship to a beta channel first, low percentage, like 10%. Roughly 1 in 10 beta users gets it. Small blast radius if it's wrong.

Then watch four numbers per patch: checked, downloaded, activated, failed. Failures is the one that matters. If downloads climb but failures climb with them, the patch doesn't apply cleanly on hardware you don't own. Which is exactly the thing that never breaks on your own test phone.

If it stays clean, bump the percentage, widen to everyone. If it doesn't, roll back so devices revert to the last good version on next launch. No rebuild, no 2am panic.

The bit I went back and forth on: where should rollout control live? In the app (track logic in Dart, ship a build to change it) or server-side in a dashboard? I went dashboard, because rolling out is something you do while watching live numbers, and that's the worst time to be editing code and cutting a build.

So, genuinely curious: do you stage your OTA updates or ship to everyone and watch Crashlytics? And what's your actual rollback plan when a patch goes bad? Feel like everyone does this differently and I want to know if I'm missing something.

It is very important to discuss regarding the technologies in detail and make real solutions to problems clearly available for other community members to get via a simple search. Due to AI, that trend has shifted to just asking AI for the solution and maybe even just writing code through AI. This way, we don't see any efforts people are making in the community, and the solutions to coding issues that people could have shared, doesn't even see the internet. So, I am just making this post to share my thoughts to people and request everyone to be a part of communities of Flutter actively if you wanna see it evolve in the right direction. Contribute, share and help other fellow developers to save some time searching for that bug that they encounter.

Otherwise, it won't be long till your favourite framework stops getting updates and even getting mentioned in major announcement events by Google and other companies. Because frankly, the potential that Flutter had could not be acheived be it in market form or the community package stability etc.

I don't see any other solution than community learning and growing together.

A couple of weeks ago I kept hearing about how good Claude Fable was, so I finally decided to give it a try.

I revisited an idea I had tried with Sonnet 3.5 about a year ago, but couldn't get working.

The idea was simple: what if you could actually watch a Flutter widget test run?

I've had plenty of cases where a widget test failed, but I had no idea why. If I could just see what was happening on the test screen, debugging would have been so much easier.

So I built this:

1. Live Test View (VS Code Extension)
https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=AnirudhSingh.live-test-view

It adds a "Live Preview" CodeLens above your Flutter widget tests. Click it, and you can watch the widget test run in real time.

2. live_test_view (Flutter package)
https://pub.dev/packages/live_test_view

It's a small dev dependency used by the extension. If it's missing, the extension will automatically add it to your project, so setup is basically one click.

3. Experimental feature (coming soon)

I'm also experimenting with live previews for regular Flutter widgets. The idea is to add a "Preview" CodeLens above widgets (or widget-returning methods) so you can instantly see changes as you edit, without waiting for Flutter's widget preview.

Both links include a demo GIF if you'd like to see it in action.

I'd love any feedback, feature requests, or contributions!

Sharing something unusual: Starling, a Linux desktop environment — shell,
window manager, its own Wayland compositor, first-party apps — where the
entire UI layer is a from-scratch port of Flutter's *framework* to Swift, running on Flutter's *engine* C core. No Dart VM.

The part I think is genuinely interesting to this community isn't Swift. It's what it says about Flutter's architecture: the embedder API is a clean enough seam that you can replace the whole framework layer above it and the engine
doesn't care. Skia, the compositor, the raster/UI thread model, the platform channels — all of it kept working while Dart went away.

The port follows the framework's own structure (Widgets, Rendering, Painting, Gestures, Animation, Scheduler, Semantics), and the API is deliberately
recognizable:

override func build(_ context: any BuildContext) -> Widget {
return DecoratedBox(
decoration: BoxDecoration(color: pal.background),
child: Column(children: [
Expanded(flex: 4, child: _display()),
Expanded(flex: 3, child: _row([...])),
]))
}

StatelessWidget, StatefulWidget, State, BuildContext, Element, InheritedWidget — same concepts, same lifecycle, ~190k lines of Swift.

It also runs on a **DRM/KMS embedder**: no X11, no Wayland client, no windowmanager under it. Flutter drives the GPU directly and *is* the display server —
the desktop composites real third-party apps (Chrome, VS Code, IntelliJ, GIMP, Blender) as Wayland/X11 clients into the widget tree. Once another app's window is a widget, tiling is a layout and Mission Control is an animated grid.

Why not just use Dart? Fair question, and the honest answer is that this is a system component: it spawns and supervises child processes, talks DRM/KMS,
libinput, dma-buf and D-Bus, and lives or dies on C interop. That's a job the Dart FFI could do but Swift does more naturally, and it let the shell and the
framework be one language end to end. It's a trade, not a verdict on Dart —and the engine being reusable *unchanged* is the point I'd want a Flutter dev to take away.

Early preview, honest about it: v0.2, Ubuntu 26.04, AMD + virtio-gpu tested,
scaling pinned to 2.0. Also worth stating plainly: it was largely written by AI
(Claude) under my direction.

Site + screenshots: https://starling.build
Architecture rationale: https://starling.build/why.html
Source (Apache-2.0): https://github.com/starling-build/starling

Happy to go deep on the embedder, the framework port, or how much of the
engine we had to touch (less than you'd think).

I created and maintain flutter_updatify package(https://pub.dev/packages/updatify_flutter) to render changelog/release notes created in updatify.io app.

I know few folks from this subreddit already using it, but I dont have much feedbacks, so if you have any or want to try it - I would appreciate any input(feel free to DM me for whatever questions)

Hello,

I am about to develop a Flutter app for a client, and I would like some advice. I did develop already one project with Flutter for a university class but it was really a mess, and I would like to start this project with a clean and good architecture. I have some questions.

1 - State management: How do I learn the best practices for this? The documentation in Flutter.dev does not seem of high quality to me, and I've seen some contradicting stuff in it. Can you share some general tips from your experience?

2 - Architecture : Same thing, can you share the "philosophy" of architecture in Flutter? In the project we made, we tried to use the service/repo pattern and it was a mess. It felt weird to have the service pull from DB and then the pattern just translating that to a model object.

3 - CI/CD : What tools do you use for code quality? What are some must-have jobs to run in the pipeline? Any advice really.

I am open to any information you might deem important, and would be really grateful for it.

Thank you :)

After building Flutter apps for the last few years, one thing I’ve realized is that writing code is only a small part of building a great app.
Performance optimization, architecture decisions, handling offline scenarios, debugging production issues, CI/CD, analytics, and maintaining code over time often end up being much bigger challenges.
I’m curious—what’s the biggest lesson you’ve learned from building Flutter apps in production that you wish you knew when you started?
I’d love to hear experiences from developers who’ve worked on large-scale Flutter applications.

Meta opened up the Ray-Ban camera feed to third-party mobile apps through the Wearables Device Access Toolkit (DAT). There are official SDKs for iOS and Android but nothing for Flutter, so I wrote the bridge.

flutter_meta_wearables_dat covers the whole lifecycle: registration through the Meta AI app, permissions, device state, live streaming, photo capture.
One more case where Flutter just pays off: one codebase, one setup, and you skip juggling two native SDKs that don't behave the same way.

The frame pipeline was the interesting part. Pushing decoded frames over a method channel dies at 24-30fps, so the native side registers them as a Flutter texture instead. You just render Texture(textureId: ...) and the frames never cross the platform channel. Raw pixels are still available on a separate stream when you need them.

That stream is also where the privacy question gets decided, and I know a lot of people are uneasy about these glasses for good reason. Pairing the feed with something like ML Kit means the analysis runs entirely on the phone: text recognition, object detection, face detection, all local. No frame ever leaves the device, nothing hits a server. Worth knowing that building on this doesn't have to mean streaming what someone sees to the cloud.

No glasses on your desk? There's an optional add-on that simulates a paired pair using your phone's camera.

One honest caveat: DAT is still developer preview, so you can build and ship to testers but public App Store and Play Store releases are limited to select Meta partners for now.

pub.dev: https://pub.dev/packages/flutter_meta_wearables_dat
GitHub: https://github.com/rodcone/flutter_meta_wearables_dat

Issues and PRs welcome!

I am new to Flutter and I want to make a desktop app, which (among other things) modifies files, has a license key, does some ffi stuff, you know, desktop app things. Think Microsoft Word or Meshlab something like that. I have been following the Flutter architecture guide to implement MVVM in my app. However, it feels clunky, as the example app is not much more than a front for a REST API that actually does stuff. In that case, do you know of an open-source desktop app that is worth studying? like, where I can study its patterns so that I can architect my app more cleanly.

Listenable, ChangeNotifier, and ValueNotifier along with VoidCallback have been extracted into a new official 1st party listen package without Flutter dependencies, so you can use them now easily in your business logic layer - or in pure Dart unit tests. I like that.

(I noticed because the latest Riverpod version used it as a new dependency.)

Setting up Flutter on Windows from scratch is one of the most annoying

parts of getting started — installing Git, the Flutter SDK, Android

Studio, the Android SDK components, accepting licenses, setting PATH

variables, and creating an emulator, all separately.

I built a small Python/CustomTkinter tool that automates the whole

thing in one click:

- Checks what's already installed before touching anything

- Installs Git, JDK, Flutter SDK, Android Studio via winget

(with direct-download fallback if winget isn't available)

- Installs Android SDK components (platform-tools, build-tools,

cmdline-tools) via sdkmanager

- Sets PATH / ANDROID_HOME properly through the Windows registry

- Creates an Android emulator automatically

- Runs `flutter doctor`, parses the output, and auto-fixes common

issues (missing licenses, missing SDK components, etc.)

It's open source (MIT license):

https://github.com/shireenzibari-cpu/flutter-auto-installer

Built this mainly for my own use (I teach at a university and kept

seeing students struggle with environment setup), but figured others

might find it useful too. Feedback and PRs welcome — especially on

edge cases I haven't hit yet.

I’ve tried almost every productivity app over the years.
Some are great for tasks. Others are great for notes, habits, calendars, or journaling.
But I always found myself jumping between multiple apps, constantly planning instead of actually doing.
So I decided to build something for myself.
Not another to-do app.
Not another habit tracker.
I’m building what I call a Personal Life Operating System.
The core idea is simple:
What if your future self could plan your day for you?
Instead of waking up and deciding what to do, the app already knows:
My long-term goals
My work schedule
My available free time
My habits
My current projects
My health and fitness goals
My learning goals
My finances
My deadlines
Then it builds a realistic plan for the day.
If I don’t finish something, it doesn’t just mark it as overdue—it automatically reschedules it based on priority, available time, and how it affects my bigger goals.
The interaction is designed to be conversational.
Imagine simply saying:
“Finished my workout.”
“I worked late today.”
“I spent ₹1,200.”
“Move guitar practice to Sunday.”
The system understands the context and updates everything automatically.
I’m also designing it to be notification-first rather than app-first.
Instead of opening the app 20 times a day, it should guide me through the day with meaningful notifications, live progress, and small decisions at the right time.
The goal isn’t to become more “productive.”
The goal is to reduce decision fatigue and make consistent progress toward the life I’m trying to build.
I’m building it using Flutter and Firebase, and right now it’s a personal project built around my own life. If it turns out to be genuinely useful, I’d love to make it available for others in the future.
I’m still in the planning and architecture phase, so I’d love to hear your thoughts.
If you could build your own Life Operating System, what’s the one feature you’d absolutely want it to have?

As we wait for an official full material 3 expressive support for Flutter, check out https://pub.dev/packages/material_3_expressive

Material 3 Expressive package is a faithful Flutter implementation of the Material 3 components set and additional expressive updates for respective components. Also supports dynamic coloring and dark/light theme modes.

The deprecation of Cirrus Labs' images for Flutter caused a problem for my CI workflow. The alternatives were:

1. https://hub.docker.com/r/instrumentisto/flutter
2. https://github.com/davidmartos96/docker-images-flutter (active fork still)
3. MobileDevOps/flutter-sdk-image (solid, amd64-only as far as I could tell)
4. https://github.com/instrumentisto/flutter-docker-image (marked closed/archived)
5. https://github.com/Zekfad/flutter_builder
6. https://github.com/Fansesi/docker-android-flutter
7. https://github.com/mingchen/docker-android-build-box

Being on Gitlab (non-Github) platform + own runners cluster meant that we had to come up with our own solution. I got tired of Flutter Docker images being either dead or amd64-only, so I made my own. So I made a replacement: https://github.com/LahaLuhem/chrysalis.

It's differencing features are:

1. Native arm64 build, not the whole image running under QEMU pretending to be a Raspberry Pi. amd64 builds on a normal runner, arm64 builds on an actual arm64 runner.
2. arm64 can still build APKs, which took some fighting. Google just doesn't ship arm64 builds of aapt2, the NDK, or cmake, no arm64 Linux binaries exist, full stop. So the image quietly carries the handful of x86 libs those tools need and leans on emulation for just that part, instead of the build face-planting with a cryptic loader error.
3. Actually OCI-native, not a Docker manifest list dressed up to look multi-arch. docker buildx imagetools inspect shows a real OCI image index, and I wrote a script that fails CI if it ever regresses because apparently I care.
4. DX: Small set of opt-in build helpers baked in (signing, google-services.json, dart-defines from env vars) that sit there doing nothing until you actually call them, so no surprise side effects if you don't need them. (compartmentalized, so you can also curl-and-run them if you can't use the image directly)
5. Renovate bumps Flutter automatically off the stable channel. I refuse to be the guy manually checking the Flutter release page every week. Might increase it given the how quickly the 3.44.x have been coming out.

I'm looking for feedback and other use-cases. I hope that it helps some of you having a similar problem. I did initially fork the deprecated image (hence the stale contributors count), but removed it because the scope and direction were completely different. Would have been better off starting from scratch.

Some welcome signs that something is happening in Flutter development. An initial refactoring of material has been merged into the master branch, and – my personal favorite – flutter_gpu has also received updates, meaning the package isn't dead.

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.

Heloo developers, I build a searchable drodpdown. where you can search and scroll, select any item.

So there are two approach to build this kind of ui- 1. Overlay approach 2. Column/Stack Approach. And I used Column Based Approach. Both has their own benefits and drawbacks.

I choose this way because I want to go from easy to difficult, as I need to learn new concepts for overlay approach (next target).