Issue 230 - Flutter Tap Weekly Newsletter
5 Ways to Improve as a Flutter Developer in 2025, tutorials, videos and more.
After the holidays we are back with more news and tutorials about Flutter.
Article
Celebrating Flutter’s “Production Era”. Flutter celebrates a significant milestone as it now powers nearly 30% of new iOS apps, with over 1 million monthly active developers worldwide. From its humble beginnings as a Google experiment in 2014 to becoming a production-grade framework trusted by major companies like Universal Studios, GEICO, and LG Electronics, Flutter has revolutionized cross-platform app development by enabling high-quality experiences across mobile, web, and desktop platforms.
Workshop
Online Shorebird Workshops. Shorebird will be hosting free one-hour online workshops for getting started with Shorebird. The first will be on Monday, January 13th, at 7:30 p.m. CST.
Actionable Tips
🚀 5 Ways to Improve as a Flutter Developer in 2025
1️⃣ Master State Management
Understanding state management is crucial for building scalable and maintainable apps. Poor state management can lead to messy code and bugs.
🔧 Start with Riverpod or Bloc, and build the same app using different state management to see the differences. Refactor an old project using your preferred solution to practice.
2️⃣ Learn Dart’s Advanced Features
Dart is more than just Flutter’s programming language; mastering its advanced features can make your code more efficient and expressive.
🔧 Deepen your understanding of Dart by learning about null safety, extension methods, and async programming. Build a small app that uses isolates for heavy computations or streams for real-time data.
3️⃣ Build for Web and Desktop
Flutter's cross-platform capabilities now extend to the web and desktop. Expanding your skills to these platforms increases your marketability and project opportunities.
🔧 Create a simple project (e.g., a to-do app) and adapt it for web and desktop. Focus on responsive design using LayoutBuilder and test your app on different screen sizes and resolutions.
4️⃣ Focus on Performance Optimization
A well-optimized app offers a smoother user experience and better resource utilization. Users are quick to abandon apps with poor performance.
🔧 Use Flutter’s DevTools to analyze widget rebuilds, reduce overdraw, and identify bottlenecks. Practice optimizing animations with the ImplicitlyAnimatedWidget family.
5️⃣ Contribute to Open Source
Contributing to open-source projects is a great way to learn from others, showcase your skills, and give back to the Flutter community.
🔧 Start small by fixing bugs or improving documentation in popular Flutter packages. Use GitHub’s “Good First Issues” filter to find beginner-friendly contributions.
💡 What’s your #1 goal for improving your Flutter skills this year?
Tutorials
When Your Flutter App Refuses to Build: A Deep Dive into JDK 21 Errors and Solutions. Sometimes, bugs like this can drive any developer crazy. In this short but helpful tutorial, Proyash Paban Sarma Borah teaches us how to fix it.
Mastering GestureDetector in Flutter. Roman Ismagilov shares what we can do in Flutter with gestures and how to combine them to create new interactions.
All I Know about Layout Calculation. Tsuyoshi Chujo shows us how Flutter framework calculates the layout using RenderObject.
From Annotations to Generation: Building Your First Dart Code Generator. Dinko Marinac explains the why behind code generation and how to write your own generator so you can skip copy-pasting the boilerplate.
Videos
#FlutterInProduction. Watch to hear how Flutter has grown from an upstart UI framework with lofty goals to a production-grade solution trusted by some of the world’s largest brands are using #FlutterInProduction to craft amazing experiences that work seamlessly across platforms (eg web, iOS, Android, desktop) with great performance – all backed by a broad ecosystem and incredible developer experience.
Kickstart Your Game Development in Flutter: Dive into Flame & Tiled [Part 1]. By Tyler Codes. 🕹️ Ready to create your own top-down style game (think RPG)? In this tutorial, we'll dive into Flutter and the powerful 🔥 Flame game engine to build an awesome game from scratch.
Green Coding in Flutter: Faster Apps, Lower Environmental Impact | Flutter Heroes 2024 Talk. In this talk, you will learn various techniques to reduce your app footprint 🌱, save old devices ⚡️ and make users happier at the end of the day 😊.
Packages
mini_toast. A lightweight, flexible toast notification library for Flutter that automatically handles varying content sizes and provides smooth animations. MiniToast makes it simple to display beautiful, stacked notifications in your Flutter apps with minimal setup.
simple_audio. A cross-platform solution for playing audio in Flutter. This project's goal is to be as simple as possible, meaning it offers the core functionality only (ex. play/pause). It also aims to be stable and relatively bug free.
flutter_cookie_bridge. A Flutter plugin that synchronizes cookies between network requests (using Dio) and WebViews (using flutter_inappwebview), enabling seamless session management across your Flutter application.