This week I attended the Flutter Netherlands meetup. At this online event, we discussed the announcements from the recent Google I/O, and met a special guest: Chris Sells. We were able to ask him questions and see how good he is in avoid answering some of them 😅.

Key points from the event:

1. The time between filing an issue in the Flutter repository and closing it (either by fixing or because it is not actionable) has been decreased by 80%. This has been possible by using Firebase testing and by keeping continuous integration up and running. If CI works well and is reliable, the fix can be delivered faster.
2. Chris is proud that Flutter runs at the speed that the device allows, like a native app, and that the developers express joy with the features available for Flutter, like hot reload and the dev tools. They work a lot on making such features discoverable and easy to use.
3. Flutter is used by more than 30 teams in Google, with more than a million lines of code. These teams depend on Flutter. It is impossible to stop it now. Do not expect to find Flutter in the Google graveyard soon.

On another note, the WWDC did not introduce many interesting new features, at least from a Flutter developer point of view. I am happy to see async await in Swift, but my hope for being able to use the iPad as a full development machine is lost. 😕

- Michele Volpato

🧑‍💻 Development

Flutter Crash Course

Robert Brunhage published a 30 minutes video where he shows how to create a simple net worth tracker app. A very good resource if you are** just starting** with Flutter.

Integration testing in Flutter

Recently, the integration_test package was promoted in the Flutter SDK. In two different articles, Shawn Blais and Darshan Kawar tell us why we should use it and how to use it. You should really try, there is something magical in seeing your UI being used by the automated tests.

Flutter localization done right

Jimmy Aumard introduces and explains his Flutter package, intl_flavors. It allows you to easily integrate different translations for different flavors of your Flutter app. I am not a big fan of flavors, but until Flutter adds support for them, for some cases they are unavoidable. The next time I cannot avoid them, I will use give this package a try.

Simplify your Flutter app with Provider

Carl Wills wrote an introductory article to state management and Provider. There are already plenty of articles out there about Provider, but I always welcome well-written articles for beginners, such as this one.

🗄 Backend

The @platform: a Firebase alternative

Joe Muller experimented with @protocol. He started from the challenge of implementing end-to-end encryption in a social media app built on top of Firebase. The @protocol is based on a unique digital identifier, the @sign, which lets you choose what data you want to share, with whom, and for how long. It reminds me (a lot) of the Solid web project. I think the technology is in a very early stage, but I really hope it will improve in the future, data control and ownership should be given back to the users.