Now created an Android development water friends circle, the circle will not regularly update some Android advanced advanced information, welcome everyone with technical problems to discuss, grow together! (Including senior UI engineer, Android underlying development engineer, Android architect, native performance optimization and hybrid optimization, flutter expertise); The hope has the technology big guy to join, the water circle inside solves the problem more obtains the right bigger!

Flutter base to combat

Free access to poke it: language finches https://www.yuque.com/docs/share/0adfe429-9864-47e6-87b5-e87841f66475?#

Flutter: To hegemony of all platforms

Flutter is a Google mobile UI framework that has become increasingly popular with developers because of its ability to quickly build iOS and Android applications and develop them, as well as its high performance, portability, and ability to work with existing code. In recent years, we have seen more and more best practices based on Flutter development both at home and abroad. Currently, there are more than 80,000 applications that are fast and elegant using Flutter on Google Play.

Google’s previous goal for Flutter was to provide a portable framework for building elegant UIs that run at native speeds on a variety of platforms. This means that Cross-platform development of iOS and Android apps is not the end of Flutter, as Google sees it. Its ambition is to be the dominant framework for all-platform development. IOS and Android are just the beginning, far from the end.

For more than a year, the Google team has been extending Flutter’s cross-platform development support to the desktop, including Web, macOS, Windows, and Linux platforms.

At Last year’s Google I/O conference, the Google team announced their own experimental desktop project, which was gradually incorporated into the Flutter engine as a major addition. Although the project is not yet at production level, Flutter is already available for enthusiasts to develop Flutter applications on desktop platforms such as Mac, Windows and Linux.

Along the way, Google rewrote a lot of code for the Flutter engine to support desktop mouse and keyboard input as well as resizable top-level Windows. Flutter also adds many new UI features for the desktop, such as Material Density support and NavigationRail, experimental features in Dart:FFI, and access to system menu bars and standard dialogs, which are deeply integrated into the underlying desktop OS. Thus, Flutter can be used to build full-featured, full-sized desktop applications.

On July 8, Google and Canonical, the publisher of Ubuntu, released the first Alpha version of Flutter on Linux, marking the first step in the expansion of Flutter to the Linux desktop.

Why use Flutter on Linux?

When Google announced last year that it was adding desktop-level application support for Flutter, Canonical saw an opportunity for Linux distributions. Flutter is expected to greatly simplify the process of developing Linux applications, making it very easy for application developers to distribute their applications to Linux users through the Snap Store (Linux App Store). With Linux as the premier Flutter target platform, developers will be able to spread their applications to millions of Linux users, who will have more high-quality applications available.

Flutter has a number of attractive features for Linux platforms:

  • A thriving ecosystem of application developers

  • Multi-platform support

  • Highly optimized native applications

  • Modern UI frameworks that support declarative, reactive, and composable widgets

  • Rich development platform support including Visual Studio Code, Android Studio and IntelliJ

Canonical has assembled a development team to work closely with Google in an effort to bring Flutter to the Linux world. The two companies will continue to work together to improve Flutter’s Linux support in the future and ensure that the Linux platform support level is comparable to other platforms.

To prove that Flutter is ready for the desktop, Canonical has teamed up with designers and developers at GSkinner.com to create an innovative and elegant Flutter desktop application, Flokk.

In addition to being able to manage a user’s contacts (including searching for contacts, adding new contacts, and editing existing ones), Flokk allows users to associate contacts with information processed on GitHub and Twitter. In addition, Flokk uses a number of Flutter features to improve the UI experience. For example, the app not only has a dark theme, but also has an animation effect when switching color themes.

The creative team behind the Flokk Contacts application is led by Grant Skinner, who is known for outstanding design and building innovative user experiences. Grant commented on the experience of using Flutter on Linux:

“Building the Flokk Contacts application is very easy! We were able to apply all of our Flutter expertise to the Linux target platform with almost no adjustments, and the finished application ran very well. Working with the Canonical team has been a great experience. They are enthusiastic, committed and passionate about making Flutter perform better on all platforms, including Linux. This is an amazing project and I am excited to be able to use Flutter to develop applications for another mainstream operating system.”

Install Flutter on Linux

To make it easy for users to install Flutter on their Linux systems, Google and Canonical offer a Linux version of Flutter SDK Snap in the Snap Store.

The Flutter SDK SNAP packages everything you need to develop a Flutter application on Linux. Install Flutter SDK snap and IDE to create, build and publish Linux applications without installing many development dependencies.

For example, if you want to develop a Flutter application for Linux and your IDE of choice is Visual Studio Code, simply type on your Linux terminal:

$ snap install --classic flutter
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$ snap install --classic code
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$ code --install-extension dart-code.flutter
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If you also want to develop mobile applications using Linux, you can install the Android SDK or Android Studio (the latter includes the Android SDK) to do so. For more information about the Flutter SDK, visit:

snapcraft.io/flutter

Flutter for Linux desktop

After installing the Flutter SDK on your Linux machine, you need to access the Flutter Dev (or Master) channel and enable Linux desktop support to build desktop applications:

$ flutter channel dev
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$ flutter upgrade
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$ flutter config --enable-linux-desktop
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You now get a Linux subdirectory when you create a new Flutter project, so that your application can run as a desktop application on your Linux machine:

$ flutter create counter
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$ cd counter
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$ flutter run -d linux
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You will get a brand new Linux application built using Flutter and running on the latest stable version of GTK+. If you have an existing Flutter project and want to add Linux support to the project once the Linux target is enabled, you can add a Linux subfolder as follows:

$ cd my_flutter_app
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$ flutter create .
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So your project can run on a Linux desktop.

Write in the last

The Flutter project has been attracting attention since its inception. The Google-backed Flutter project is not only well designed, but also unconventionally planned and executed by open source projects. To support the development of Flutter, Google not only developed Dart language, but also planned the timing and pace accurately. Even in the early stages of Flutter, Google made no secret of its ambition to dominate all platforms.

Over the past few years, we’ve seen Flutter go from hobbyist plaything to development team plaything to production-level use, and maybe next year, Flutter will be ready for production on Linux.

Flutter: Children choose, adults all want!