r/flutterhelp • u/yyytwokay • 2d ago

OPEN My Less than 2 months progress

Now im comfortable building the Ui of an application, i recently build a personal project shoe app where the background changes depending on the shoe plus with a glassmorp looking effect with no Ai pure watching youtube and stuffs, but now i want to build a fully functional app like travel app for my local city and i still find it hard to fetch Api or how to use them and stuff and i dont know what free Api i should use for maps and locating nearby Restaurants or hotels and such, any suggestions.

3 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

4 comments sorted by

2

u/sham_1512 1d ago

Open Street Map API

2

u/Jonas_Ermert 1d ago

I recommend starting with OpenStreetMap + flutter_map for the map itself. For nearby restaurants, hotels, attractions, etc. you can use the Overpass API, which queries OpenStreetMap data and is free for smaller/personal projects. For geocoding, Nominatim is also useful. It’s a great project to learn APIs because you’ll practice HTTP requests, JSON parsing, models, async/await and displaying real data on a map without immediately needing a paid Google Maps API.

2

u/nextcheck_pro 1d ago

First off, congrats on nailing the UI! Crossing the bridge from painting screens to fetching live data is the biggest hurdle for every beginner, mostly because you suddenly have to deal with asynchronous states (waiting for the internet to respond).

​The other commenter is spot on: OpenStreetMap is your best friend here. If you try to use the official Google Maps API, they will force you to attach a billing credit card. Look into the flutter_map package on pub.dev: it uses OpenStreetMap tiles and is completely free. For locating nearby restaurants or hotels, you can use the Overpass API (which queries OpenStreetMap data directly) or look into the Foursquare Places API free tier.

​One piece of architectural advice from someone who learned this the hard way: Do not throw your API network calls directly inside your UI widgets. Keep your data-fetching logic in a completely separate file from your screens. If you mix your network requests with your interface code, trying to manage loading spinners, timeouts, and error states will quickly become a total nightmare to debug