roughike

How is that going for you?

This app was started in 2017 and it is still running today and making (way more modest than back then) revenue. It’s just that I don’t work on it anymore.

> This fundamentally does not work for anyone with more than 10M+ installs just like you can't write Mandarin and English in one script.

Well, I did work on a Flutter app with a tiny team between 2018-2021 and we had 15M installs, were app of the day, got featured multiple times in the App Store, got Google’s design award, were a preloaded app on iPhones in Apple Stores in several countries, and were overall doing quite well.

It was a very focused app though, so the size of our codebase didn’t really grow with the number of installs.

I only have one meeting a month nowadays so I might take a look if that situation ever changes (hopefully it doesn't!).

Regardless, congrats on the launch.

> the macOS app and Chrome extension communicate via WebSockets on localhost; nothing leaves your machine.

So the macOS app sets up a local webserver on some port that the Chrome extensions knows about in advance? Smart, kinda like how I had to do an auth flow for one of my CLI apps.

Thanks!

I'm really glad you liked it! To be honest, I felt a little self-conscious about some parts of it, but generally, I'm quite happy with it.

It also helps that Dart is a familiar language without too much magic!

For iOS apps, you need a Mac. Maybe (and this is theoretical) you could set up a combined Fastlane & CI integration that builds the apps using some cloud service, such as Macincloud, Bitrise, etc. Fastlane would then build and upload the iOS test builds automatically so can use them on your phone using the internal testing group in TestFlight. When everything seems fine, then you can just promote the internal test build to production. Since Flutter custom renders everything, you could do most of the development on a Linux machine and test on Android emulator/device.

For just Android, you don't need a Mac at all.

I actually don't have any experience in that, but I think that you can absolutely do it. From what I understand, the IDEs just call the Flutter CLI and Dart analysis server, among other tools to get stuff done. From the top of my head, "flutter run", "flutter test", "flutter analyze", "flutter packages get" would be the commands you'd be using the most and could survive without using any IDEs. Of course you'd lose the autocompletion along with other IDE niceties, but I really believe that could be done. One thing is you might have to open XCode once to do the provisioning profile setup, but after that you should be good.

I'm hoping someone with more experience could chime in.

Thanks, glad you find it useful! And that's exactly the reason I open sourced it - I thought there was a need for a quite comprehensive but still simple sample app for people to learn :)

I don't really agree about pushing hard on Material Design. Sure, the current widget situation might be skewed towards Material components and Cupertino is lacking. For Material widgets, they've implemented almost everything, even the most obscure ones. But I think they're pushing more for customized UIs. Meaning, UIs that don't look Material or Cupertino, but are more of a branded experience, think Spotify, Tinder, Snapchat, etc. Designs that don't really conform to Material or iOS design languages. The Hamilton app is a good example of this. Sadly, I'm not a UI designer so I went with Material Design on this inKino app since that's an easy route for me.

With your other points, I generally agree. Didn't mean to imply that it "just works" 100% of the time. But compared to other cross-platform dev tools / SDKs I've used, I feel like Flutter does such a great job in the tooling department.

For the difference in coding time, it's hard to estimate. I'd say once you get the hang of it, which for me was quite fast, it's much more pleasant and generally faster than working with native Android. Hard UI related things on Android (rounded corners or customizing the design library components) are pleasant to do and make a lot of sense in Flutter.

Flutter and Dart come with a nice HTTP library out of the box. In my experience, it does everything you'd expect from a networking library. If you're looking for something like Retrofit on Android, there's a package called "jaguar_http" that does the job.

For taking/picking images, you'd use the officially supported "image_picker" plugin. It exposes a nice API based on Dart's Futures and handles Android's onActivityResult dance for you in the background. If you're looking into embedding a camera preview in a Flutter app, there's a package called "camera" for that.

There's generally a plugin that handles the platform stuff you need to do. If not, you can always create one and use Java/Kotlin/Swift/ObjC code to call the native SDK APIs you need yourself. Having published a couple plugins myself, I've found the plugin system to be really nice.