Top 10 Flutter Articles of the Past Month (Sep 2018)

Flutter is Google’s new mobile app toolkit for crafting beautiful native interfaces on iOS and Android in record time.

In the beginning of September, Flutter announced Flutter Release Preview 2, the last major milestone before Flutter 1.0. Already on December 4, Flutter will hold a live show and present how hybrid mobile apps are built.

Nevercode mobile app developers have listed their top 10 reads of the previous month that will help you master your Flutter skills. As mobile CI/CD for professionals, we take quality very seriously and make sure each article you read is great. If we have missed some valuable read, please share your thoughts in the comments.

#1 Flutter Release Preview 2

Even before the 1.0 release is out, Flutter is one of the top 50 active software repositories on GitHub. Many developers continue to discover Flutter and that’s one hell of a reason to take a look at what the Google Flutter team has been up to and see how to upgrade to Flutter Release Preview 2.

— -> Flutter Release Preview 2: Pixel-Perfect on iOS

“Flutter has been open source from day one. That’s by design. Our goal is to be transparent about our progress and encourage contributions from individuals and other companies who share our desire to see beautiful user experiences on all platforms.”

#2 Why Flutter

Google’s Flutter is the new cool kid on the block! Therefore, it’s understandable to be interested and cautious at the same time. Alex Robbio, President & co-founder of Belatrix Software, interviewed businesses which have decided to take the plunge.

— -> Google Flutter: Why CTOs Should Pay Attention To It, by Alex Robbio, Forbes

“Particularly for startups, the value proposition of using Flutter is highly attractive, because it solves many of the pain points they face, especially when dealing with limited time and budget to get your software product to market.”

#3 How to Get Started

If you can’t resist the urge to see what’s the buzz around Flutter, you will need to take Flutter for a spin yourself. Luckily, Flutter claims in its docs that programming with Flutter is so easy that no prior programming knowledge is required. (And by the way, 93% of Flutter user survey respondents consider the quality of Flutter documentation good, very good or excellent.)

— -> How I Got Started with Flutter, by Simone Arpe, pspdfkit.com

“The Flutter team did a great job on the upgrading process, and it runs smoothly every time; even after a long period, it proved to be rock solid, and running flutter upgrade did the job with no problems. While it’s still too early to make any definitive claims about Flutter, I enjoyed working with it and will keep my eye on it to see what happens next.”

#4 Shift to Flutter

An amazing read by Gary Hunter who took Easy Diet Diary App and ported it to Flutter. What does it mean to port large apps to Flutter and how satisfying are the results?

— -> Porting a 75,000 line native iOS app to Flutter, by Gary Hunter

“When I embarked on the port I estimated it would take 6 man months. Well, the project is coming in ahead of schedule! For me, that’s fairly unusual.”

#5 Flutter Apps in Production

Finally some real-life scenarios. Read about how The Hamilton App was taken to production, and 2M installs and 20+versions later, what are the key steps to maintain a Flutter production app for 14+ months.

— -> Going Live with Flutter, by Very Good Ventures

#6 Using a Single Code Base for Different Platforms

The advantage of hybrid apps is the ability to develop high-quality apps for iOS and Android using a single code base. So, in theory, one could save tons of time and money. Is it really so? Pedro Moreno shares their EntrenaPro journey with Flutter and inspires other tech companies to choose Flutter for their next project.

— -> How we built an awesome App with Flutter in 4 months, by Pedro Moreno

“When you manage a project and you need to choose between powerful program languages which could bring the same meaning for the user, logic tells you should pick up the more mature one, the one where you find more developers and the one where your team has more experience. When you know this, and you still prefer to choose a brand new technology your team wants to learn to see how far we can go, you can either be a bit crazy or count on someone like Ahmed on the mobile side to challenge logic”

#7 Flutter Pros and Cons

Flutter has had its fair share of praise. It hits two birds with one stone and is expected to save a lot of time and money. However, before taking your business app to Flutter, here’s a comprehensive overview of the advantages and disadvantages of Flutter you should consider.

— ->“Flutter: Pros and Cons for Seamless Cross Platform Development”, by Angela Beklemysheva

“It takes about 250 hours to develop an average app in Flutter that will work on both iOS and Android, whereas it takes about 400 hours to develop such an app for iOS and 250 hours to build an average app for Android.”

# 8 Flutter & CI/CD

Testing is an integral part of any mobile project, so this article gives you a comprehensive overview of why you need to implement CI/CD and how to set it up for your Flutter project.

— -> Continuous Integration and Delivery for Flutter apps, by Shashikant Jagtap

“We can build nice apps with Flutter but we also need to build, test and release Flutter apps effectively using best DevOps and CI/CD practices.”

# 9 Flutter and Widgets Tests

Flutter is all about widgets. How to successfully test widgets and deliver healthy Flutter apps?

— -> Testing tidbit #2 — Why does using Image.network crash widget tests?, by Iiro Krankka

“Running widget tests headlessly without any simulator or emulator is pretty dope”

# 10 Flutter UI Challenges

An comprehensive code examples how to implementate of Johnny Vino’s BMI Calculator in Flutter. Gender,

— -> MBI Calcluator in Flutter, by Marcin Szałek

“This time I will go through the implementation of height picker using GestureDetector. Let’s see how it goes.”

If you noticed some useful read about Flutter that we have missed, please share them in comments. 👏

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