This quarter most of us are working with two other students on a group project. With all of the fantastic options out there on hardware, operating systems, IDEs, etc. it’s unlikely the entire group is running the same gear. It’s pretty fascinating how it all comes together and still works well. In our group we have:
1. On Mac using VSCode
2. On Windows using VSCode
3. On Linux using AndroidStudio

Keep in mind that our group is developing a mobile application using Flutter. Our member on Linux using AndroidStudio was the newest to Flutter so he had to do some research to get his environment running. Some of the differences we’ve found is that VSCode will automatically run a flutter pub get to install packages and dependencies when you update pubscpec.yaml; however, it appears that on AndroidStudio you have to run it manually. Another difference was that a version of the Flutter image_picker package that I used on Mac with VSCode was not yet supported by our Linux/AndroidStudio developer. We had to downgrade our image_picker version, but all functionality worked just as well.

As you can see so far we haven’t had any major roadblocks due to different development environments, but there have been a few challenges. It’s amazing that all of these different components can work cohesively almost seamlessly even though none of us have an identical setup. I think the only thing we all share in common is the Android emulator. I’ll let you know if we run into any other interesting issues due to differing development environments!