Any Flutter devs on IH?
I'm primarily a web developer but have been meaning to dip my toes in the mobile dev scene. I first played around with Flutter about a year ago and really enjoyed writing code in Dart.
Some other projects took my attention, but I'm trying to get back into it Flutter lately.
I'd love to see what IH has built, how you monetized it, and (if you're a web dev) how building a mobile product differs from a web app.
Edit: I built https://builtwithflutter.dev so creators can show off their apps and lend inspiration. I've included a flag for open-source apps to also share their github repo. Check it out if you'd like to share your app
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Yep! I've been building with flutter for about a year and a half, in that time I've made four apps (two are released and two are in alpha/beta testing).
So far I've only monetized one of them (one is open source, one I still plan on monetizing but sort of stopped working on, one is prerelease but will be subscription based). The one I'm monetizing is a simple mobile game with Google admob ads.
I've done a little web development but I don't think I could enumerate all the differences. For me, flutter has been the right choice because it's cross platform, the development experience is unrivaled in my opinion, and I really like dart.
Do you have any other questions?
That's awesome.
The backend logic, splitting up the code, and making API requests all makes sense to me. But I'm struggling with the 'front-end', there are so many widgets available and it's hard to know when to use which for what reason. It feels like there's ton of Lego pieces and unless I familiarize myself with most of them, I'm using the wrong piece and make everything around it fragile. Does that make sense?
Felt similar at the beginning. Try to take it a widget at a time and focus on the basic ones first. ListView, Column, Row, Stack, Text, Container, etc.. Animation is also really helpful to practice. And futures, streams. Also, try early to check out how the existing widgets are built. Soon you will start to see patterns and things will start to feel familiar. Building a widget tree feels pretty similar to React. Finally, don’t try to build perfect apps at the beginning but rather get familiar with refactoring. Then, once you get to know more patterns and widgets, you can easily change things around. Good luck!
Thanks. That's pretty much the approach I'm taking now; Write most of my code in-line and start refactoring as I get more comfortable.
I usually use lots of white space and short/readable code. The whole widget structure can get quite busy which I'm not used to. 😅
Yeah that makes sense, I don't have any good answer other than it'll be easier as you get more familiar, and you'll find that there are a smaller subset of widgets that are used the most.
Luckily the documentation is great and they have example code snippets for a lot of widgets. I'd recommend maybe checking out the docs on layout widgets (row/column/stack etc) to get started. They also have a "flutter for web developers" section that might help too. What are you trying to build?
Hey, I hope you are doing fine. I m looking for a Flutter Dev to Partner up for a Project. Let me know if you would be interested in discussing further.
I think it's just the learning curve I need to get past. And probably a bit of web dev mindset standing in my way.
No real apps planned yet, just playing around with small ideas to get my bearings. Right now I'm working a simple image browser for Reddit: https://builtwithflutter.dev/apps/reddit-swiper
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Bookmarked. Thank you 😃
I built Timelog with Flutter! It's a simple habit tracking app with time tracking and goals, and there's "premium" features you can unlock for a price.
Alternative ways of monetization would be ads, but this depends on the app as it would make sense for games but would be intrusive (and ugly) for other apps. I'd say the best way is monthly subscriptions, but the app should be providing enough value so that it's worth paying for every month. Premium features, for example, make more sense as a one-off payment.
Flutter is a great framework if you want to move to mobile from a web dev background. One huge difference is that your app is going to go through the Play Store and App Store (there are other stores too but these two are the biggest by far).
Getting your app on the Google Play Store is pretty straight forward (there is a one-time fee of $25 for a dev account), and you could pay for Google ads to get downloads (I haven't tried this yet personally so I don't know how cost-effective it would be, but I think it's one of the easiest ways to market your mobile app).
Apple's App Store is similar but you have to pay $99 per year (this is a bit crazy for mobile devs just starting out!) for a dev account. The process of registering, then submitting your app (and subsequent updates) could take days (even weeks!) at a time.
Then you also need to consider App Store Optimization (ASO, similar to SEO for websites, look it up!), and the fact that the price you charge for your app is before tax, and the app stores also get 30% of your profits.
It's a tedious process, and I'm still a bit early into this (I've published on the Google Play Store but my Apple dev account is still pending approval a few weeks later!), but I believe once you go through all these for your first app you should be able to very quickly ship improvements to your app, and make more apps with probably less than half the time!
Good luck!
Awesome, thanks for the publishing breakdown. It's definitely a different process than publishing a website where I'm in control of everything. I've been following DHH's whole drama with Apple, and the 30% is 🤯.
I'm excited for a new challenge and publishing a mobile app seems like a fun project. Trying to decide of building something fresh, or building an app based on one of my web apps.
Timelog looks great. Would you care to share it on Built with Flutter? I launched yesterday and love browsing people's creations to A) See what's possible, and B) Get design inspiration
You should definitely build something simple first just to get familiar with the publishing process first. So basing an app based on an existing web app sounds like a good idea!
Built with Flutter looks great, happy to submit Timelog there!
Huge flutter guy here! We actually just ported over our webapp to use Flutter/Dart and just built a mobile app from the ground up. I would warn you that some of the Dart dependencies are really rough but the ecosystem is slowly becoming more mature.
Happy to help answer any questions!
You've built your web app using Flutter? That's still in beta, correct? How is the performance?
Hey Michael,
My friend @SrineeshFlutter_ion is a Flutter developer. He made some pretty cool Flutter App templates that you should check out.
Hope you feel welcome :)