For my capstone project I am working on a team to develop a cross platform mobile app to increase access for farmers to OSU wheat and barley testing data.
In this post I am going to discuss my favorite technology that I am using for the project, why I like it and what we are using it for and improvement ideas.
The most interesting technology that we are using in our app is the cross platform design Framework Flutter. Flutter allows you to create a cross platform app (IOS, Android and even Web) with one dedicated codebase which gets compiled into the various different apps. Flutter is incredibly powerful and allows for rapid development and testing. This is my first experience using Flutter and can easily see the benefits of using it vs. coding native apps as it allows for a small team to utilize their resources much more effectively by only having codebase. Previously all my mobile development experience was done in Android Native using Kotlin as the language, and I can say if we had to develop the same app on multiple platforms it would easily take us 2-3x as long to ensure they are consistent and functioning the same.
Overall the progress we have made so far has been rapid and that is directly related to our decision to use Flutter as the framework. The one downside I will say I have found is the support for Flutter isn’t as good as Native Android. I have found a few bugs that have open requests to be resolved and haven’t had any progress in fixing them for multiple months. One such bug is running the debug version of the app while trying to make a network call to a non IPV6 host results in the network call failing. This took me multiple hours to identify and resolve (the fix was ultimately just running a production version vs. debug and network calls were made just fine). But this makes testing a bit of a pain – right now if I could improve one thing about flutter it would be resolving that bug.
Overall however I enjoy the framework and it is fun to learn and create in the flutter Framework – part of this again is directly linked ot how fast it is to go from a mockup to actual running code.
I hope you enjoyed my post and I look forward to posting agin in the future!
Thanks!
Andrew
Leave a Reply