Flutter Learnings & Zero Inbox can handle HTML emails now

It's a significant milestone since HTML emails don't simply render in a text box component in mobile apps, while being a critical feature for an email client. You can find the milestone update on the Zero Inbox product page (https://www.indiehackers.com/product/zero-inbox-2)

Here I'd like to share my learnings from building this with Flutter.

Some of you may already know, showing HTML content in a mobile app requires a little more work. Mobile apps have their own UI rendering capabilities and rendering HTML in a mobile app requires managing a browser-like component programmatically.

Flutter code compiles to an Android and an IOS app, which means a library in Flutter will handle talking to the browser components in Android (WebView) and IOS (WKWebView), respectively. Unfortunately, the official library (webview_flutter) seems to lack some critical functionality like setting the font size or managing the zoom for the browser component. This was a little frustrating because these features are supported by the underlying Android and IOS components, but webview_flutter didn't care to implement a connection to all the underlying endpoints - some of which would help set the font size. As a result, I ended up using a 3rd party component (flutter_inappwebview), which I feel like might bring me some headache in the future if the developer decides to stop supporting it.

WebView component is also a little quirky when it comes to how it integrates with the rest of the Flutter app. Let's just say it took some wrangling.

If you end up having to deal with WebView in Flutter in the future, feel free to DM me and I'll share the fruits of an entire day's Googling with you ✌️