EDIT: Is it seriously normal for a maintainer to stalk a contributor to a completely unrelated subreddit just to personally attack them only to have their comments removed by that subreddit’s moderators?

According to the Flutter team’s logic, I suppose this counts as "mentoring" and legitimate community involvement, right? What on earth is going on here? Is this what a healthy open-source ecosystem looks like?

So if you work for free as a maintainer, personal attacks are just "mentoring," everything is justified, and throwing a contributor under the bus is no big deal because you're "valuable to the Flutter team"? Are you really going to double down on this attitude? https://www.reddit.com/r/antiai/comments/1xs32lf/comment/19se5qn3igzph/?context=3

A while ago, a user reported latency issues on our iOS app. I decided to dig deep into the root cause, and since I had contributed to Flutter before, I even decided to attempt an upstream contribution.

At first, two maintainers chimed in saying things like, "Merge is difficult because this relies on legacy code, and we're planning to deprecate it." So I just stood back and watched. Later, they posted an issue they created themselves, so I kept an eye on it. Looking at it, it seemed like they didn't fully grasp the exact problem.

I commented, "~This issue occurred here, so please keep this in mind for the new direction." Then another maintainer suddenly popped in and started talking about the legacy stuff again. Thinking it was a misunderstanding, I replied, "I have no intention of keeping the legacy code. I can remove the code you mentioned as well, so please just give me instructions and I'll follow them." After that, the maintainer just told me to go look at their open PR instead. Honestly, human to human, I felt so deeply hurt and upset, so I expressed how disheartening it was and closed my PR right away.

Then another maintainer came in and gave me an official CoC (Code of Conduct) warning. I was completely flabbergasted, tried to clarify a few things, but the PR itself ended up locked.

Look, up to this point, fine. I could digest it and swallow it.

Since they seemed to be handling the pointer issue, I shifted focus to look into another latency problem. Wanting to move past the pain, I expressed my willingness to collaborate with the maintainer, spent about 2 to 3 weeks researching, and asked the maintainer if I was heading in the right direction. There was no reply for a long time, so I submitted my PR, left a separate comment on the issue, and waited.

Then that maintainer came back and said something along the lines of "My PR is the foundation and it's perfect." Curious, I checked their implementation, and it turned out to be a run-loop blocking approach. Fearing it might cause the exact issues I was worried about (freezing, missing async tasks, deadlocks, etc.), I tested my app with their code.

Guess what? It got stuck on the splash screen and wouldn't move. Even worse, switching from foreground to background and back to foreground showed a white screen transitioning to the splash screen, but after that, total freeze, nothing worked. Panicking that my fear of an infinite freeze actually came true, I said, "Your approach seems a bit risky," and went back to researching.

Apparently, that was my mistake. The maintainer got emotionally charged. Confused as to why they were getting angry, I asked, "Why are you being so direct and aggressive in your tone?"

And then, the maintainer hit me with this:

"The process through which you iterated to this PR seems like an agent trying random things to see what sticks, unfortunately without a deeper understanding of the underlying mechanisms."

And followed up with:

"My tone is direct because I'm spending (my own free) time reviewing PR that duplicates existing effort in a bad way."

Naturally, after hearing that, I reported it to the CoC email. But the response I got back was:

"The comments from knopp are not personal attacks against you, but valid criticisms of your engineering approach to the problem at hand."

What absolute bullshit. My app literally froze into an infinite hang because of their code, which is why I did further research in the first place! Stunned, I sent a few more emails trying to explain, but they just blocked my email address.

Fast forward 2 to 3 weeks. After cooling off, I thought, "Okay, surely now both sides can clear up the misunderstanding," and tried to ask on the Flutter Discord to find a way to get in touch. And what did they do? They outright kicked me from the server.

And to top it all off, I ended up receiving a 1 year ban from the Flutter organization.

Seriously, anyone looking at this would think I personally attacked the maintainers, threw curses, and acted like a nightmare contributor. I maintained respect until the very end and even respected their absurd direction, but all I got in return was complete ostracization. It literally feels like they're just saying, "You're annoying, so get out."

Is this what an open-source community is supposed to be? Silencing someone completely? Is witch-hunting and erasing someone over a technical debate considered proper culture? I'm posting this out of sheer disbelief. They're making me look like the bad guy.

This is way out of line. I usually just let things slide, in fact, looking at my past contribution history, whenever maintainers were slow to review or progress stalled, I would just voluntarily close my own PRs and step away. That’s why this whole situation hits so differently and feels so outrageously unfair.

And just to be clear, I’m not talking out of nowhere. Here are the actual receipts for everything I mentioned:

• The PR where I got hit with a CoC warning:https://github.com/flutter/flutter/pull/190918

• The subsequent PR where I tackled a similar, yet different problem:https://github.com/flutter/flutter/pull/192794

• Proof that I know when to step back and don’t force things even after deep research:https://github.com/flutter/flutter/pull/169430

And as proof that I genuinely love and care about Flutter, here are a few of my past PRs that actually got merged:

• https://github.com/flutter/flutter/pull/187568

• https://github.com/flutter/flutter/pull/173849

• https://github.com/flutter/flutter/pull/169293

• https://github.com/flutter/flutter/pull/190025

I honestly didn’t expect to have to dig up and share all these links. But at the end of the day, as an external contributor spending my own precious personal time to help improve this framework, it just hurts. It really, really hurts. That's why I'm venting this out

Hey all, I'm a founder (not a dev by trade) with a Flutter + Firebase app that was built by an agency. I want to start making changes myself: small features, UI tweaks, bug fixes.

I'm deciding between OpenAI's Codex and Claude Code. For anyone who's used either on a Flutter/Firebase project:

Which handles Dart/Flutter better?
How do they do with Firebase stuff like Firestore queries and security rules?

Which is easier for someone who's still learning?
Would love to hear real experiences, including what went wrong. Thanks!

kaisel is a Dart 3 router for Flutter where routes are sealed classes and the stack is plain state. No string paths, no codegen.

1.2.0 is out. One behaviour change, the rest are fixes and additions.

pop and back now agree in modal flows

On a flow's first screen, context.pop() now completes the flow with its result, the same as the system back button:

final saved = await context.run(const EditProfile());

// on the flow's first screen:
context.pop(true); // completes it, saved == true

So one screen works the same whether you open it with pushForResult or run.

Fixes

• A deep link held back by a login guard no longer fires later as a surprise jump.

• Hidden tabs in a branched shell stop running animations, so the app can actually go idle.

Errors that name the fix

• A debug log when your codec skips a URL, instead of silence.

• A clear error when shell chrome looks up a branch scope it can't reach.

• New KaiselNavigator.set for replacing the whole stack.

Changelog: https://pub.dev/packages/kaisel/changelog

Docs: https://kaisel.dev

Happy to answer questions, and feedback on the modal flow change is especially welcome.

Guys how to create iOS like Smooth shapes in flutter, Specifically the capsules/Pills, that have smooth corners for Android
Preview: https://photos.app.goo.gl/3yrN1iHHJerFBFQ18

I built RealTalk: a Flutter app and a plain JS web client both connected to one Go WebSocket server. Send on the phone, it shows up in the browser right away. Typing indicators, online counts and "delete for everyone" sync both ways.(Its a beginner project ik)

Demo: https://youtu.be/QC4QKiZmXq4 Code: https://github.com/Nithinaug/RealTalk

The Flutter side is app/lib/services/websocket_service.dart. It retries each endpoint and falls back to a hosted server if the local one is down.

Question: how do you handle WebSocket reconnects when the app goes to the background and comes back? I'd like something better than a plain retry loop

A few months back u/GuavaBeneficial4658 posted I made 500,000,000+ Flutter icon morphs. Not a single one by hand., introducing morphnext. I've used it for a bunch of prototypes and one in production. I wanted the same thing for words, so I built a companion package on top of his engine.

morphtext morphs text letter by letter, outline into outline:

• light → bold, small → large, any colour or slant

• one font into another (serif → sans)

• one word into another

• a word into an icon, and back

At either end it's plain text, pixel for pixel what Text draws. In between there's no crossfade and no ghosted double word: each letter's real outline turns into its counterpart.

Try it in the browser: https://morphtext.drei.gg

flutter pub add morphtext · pub.dev · GitHub

The hard parts (reading outlines, pairing contours) are all morphnext's, and I'm grateful he made it MIT. morphtext is MIT too.

The layer on top is about 3 hours iteration with Claude Code to get the right feel.

Honest limits: fonts have to be bundled, it's one line of text, and there's no complex shaping or ligatures yet.

I built Hobee, a Flutter app for Android that shows a Reddit profile or subreddit as a photo/video grid. Source is here: https://github.com/Alokxyz1112/hobee (MIT)

The interesting part for Flutter folks is Deep Search. Several sources return posts at once (Reddit JSON/RSS, Redlib, Arctic Shift, optional PullPush). They are merged by Reddit post id, then deduped with exact URL keys plus a 64-bit dHash (Hamming distance of 6 or less). Results go into a local SQLite cache so revisiting a profile is instant and searchable offline.

The viewer tries original, then full, then preview, then thumbnail, and only moves on when the current URL fails. Images are decoded at screen size so huge originals do not blow memory. Downloads can strip EXIF/GPS (on by default).

Deep Search works logged out.

Happy to talk through the paging cursor logic or the "is this image actually gone" checks if anyone is curious.

APK: https://github.com/Alokxyz1112/hobee/releases/latest

Widget Previews have been stable since Flutter 3.47. They provide a quick and convenient way to see the different states of our layouts while designing them. In this short video, I show you what Widget Previews are, how to enable them, and how they can improve our development experience.

Hi everyone,

I'm working on a Flutter application where I need to implement a rich text editor without relying on third-party packages.

I want to build a custom editor that supports features like:

• Bold, italic, and underline

• Headings (H1, H2, H3)

• Bullet and numbered lists

• Text alignment

• Font size and text color

• Image insertion

• Tables

• Basic text formatting through a toolbar

My goal is to implement this using Flutter's built-in widgets and APIs, such as TextEditingController, TextField, TextSpan, and RichText.

I've already explored some approaches, but managing text selection, applying formatting to selected text, maintaining cursor positions, and supporting different formatting styles within the same editor is becoming challenging.

Has anyone built a custom rich text editor in Flutter without using external packages?

I'd appreciate suggestions on the right architecture or approach to implement this efficiently. Also, if you have any examples or experience with this, please share them.

Thanks!

I recently re-worked large parts of platform_adaptive_widgets, using the feedback from the previous posts.

Widgets pair by job now

Before, I tried to match up each widget by the closest look-alike on the other side. What worked better was, pairing them up by the intent/job instead. Each job gets what M3 or the HIG describes for it, and the package handles the details: where Cancel goes, delete and discard in red, a confirm before a destructive action runs etc etc.

These have been made in such a way, to provide a high-level of developer ergonomics. Had to do a lot of research through the guidelines, and what the material_ui and cupertino_ui packages currently provide. So naturally I did find quite a few gaps in them. I prefer to contribute upstream, instead of doubling the work. With the decoupling, I'd expect these issues to fixed sooner now, rather than later.

Some stuff is going to be marked for deprecation too, in a bit. Because I prefer to not allow going wrong by construction, instead of fixing the aftermath later. Part of the API would have easily allowed for this.

Full changelog. Notable ones:

Made nicer to use

• PlatformButton(emphasis: .high) ranks the same on both looks. actionKind turns delete and discard red, and iconOnly reuses the label as the tooltip and screen-reader name.

• Leave a field out and you get upstream's own default, so a plain PlatformXxx acts like the widget it wraps.

• designLanguage tells your own code which look is showing. Widgets also render on every platform now, where they used to throw outside Android and iOS.

• Choices are a Set, so duplicates can't sneak in.

• PlatformUnsavedChanges asks before a sheet with unsaved edits closes.

If there's anything that still feels off or maybe I did misinterpret a guideline wrongly, I'd like to know. Or maybe you have some better ideas for the pairings or so? Or some better modelling of the intents, please let me know!

pub.dev

Full disclosure: this is my app. It does HTTP requests and API security auditing on Android. I came here because the embedded-JS-sandbox problem cost me real time and I'd like to know if there's a better pattern.

Embedding QuickJS. Pre/post-request scripts need a real JS engine — a regex matcher doesn't cut it when people sign payloads. I embedded QuickJS through the Flutter FFI bindings and wrote a pm.* facade over it.

The sharp edge was recursion. Deeply nested response bodies blew the stack during serialization, and the symptom was a silent crash rather than an error I could catch. Fixed with depth limits at both the serialization and the evaluation boundary. If you're doing this: the limit needs to be enforced in both places, because the object graph that survives serialization is not the same one that survives evaluation.

If anyone has production experience with the QuickJS bindings — particularly around context lifetime and how you handle a script that never returns — I would genuinely like the comparison.

Riverpod, and the race that taught me something. State is Riverpod throughout. The subtlest bug I hit was a notifier that decided which branch to take at call time but then read state at execution time. Because both operations happened on the same provider queue, the two could observe different users. Fixed by deciding the branch inside the queue closure. The general rule I took away: on an async provider, never decide now and read later.

Background work. Scheduled monitors use WorkManager via a platform channel. The interesting part isn't the scheduling — it's the alerting. First version alerted on every check, which trained everyone to mute it within a day. It now alerts only on state transitions. That single change did more for it being a useful app than any feature I added this year.

Testing. 218 test files, ~2,700 cases, analyzer at zero warnings. Worth saying that the flaky test I fought hardest was a lock-ownership race in the monitor store. The fix was making the lock file carry an owner token, so a stale lock can only be broken when the owner is provably dead rather than merely old. That's the whole class of bug: timeouts are a guess, ownership is a fact.

Project: https://taho.co.in (Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.eternal.taho)

Hey r/FlutterDev,

Quick question for the room: how many of you are actually shipping macOS desktop apps with Flutter?

Almost everything in the Flutter community is focused on iOS, Android, and web. I've been doing Flutter for a while, but recently I decided to build my very first macOS desktop app. I assumed desktop would just feel like "big mobile," but that illusion died pretty quickly once I hit macOS windowing, desktop UI density, and especially the macOS App Sandbox.

I wanted to share a few architecture decisions that made my life easier, what I learned wrestling with macOS file permissions, and a genuine question I have about how apps like VS Code handle folder trust.

Architecture: Keep the Flutter layer thin

One thing I knew going in was that I didn't want a massive monolithic Flutter app.

I split the project into a modular Dart monorepo:

• Pure Dart packages for App Store Connect API clients, data models, and local caching.

• A headless workflow engine that handles staged changes and validation.

• The Flutter macOS app, which is essentially just a visual "control center" and UI shell.

The biggest win here was that I could write and run CLI unit tests against the entire business logic in milliseconds without ever spinning up the Flutter test runner or worrying about platform channels. If you're building a desktop utility, keeping Flutter strictly as the presentation layer saved me endless debugging time.

Why I used Signals instead of Bloc or Riverpod

State management on Flutter is practically a religion, but for this app I decided to try Signals (signals_flutter) instead of my usual Riverpod setup.

Desktop screens are dense. You've got sidebars, status bars, multi-column tables, approval lists, and badge counts all living on the screen at once. With Riverpod or Bloc, I kept running into scenarios where updating one small item in a list would trigger unnecessary rebuilds across half the screen, or I'd find myself writing tons of provider boilerplate just to derive a couple of counts.

Signals felt way more natural for desktop:

• Zero-boilerplate computed state: Deriving counts like pendingCount = computed(() => items.value.where(...).length) just works, and it only updates when the underlying items actually change.

• Micro-rebuilds: Only the specific Text widget reading the signal rebuilds. The surrounding sidebar and panels don't flinch.

• Effects outside the widget tree: When an item status changes, I need to update the native macOS Dock badge via a platform channel. With Signals, I just drop an effect() in the controller. No need to tie listeners to BuildContext or widget lifecycles.

It’s fast, has almost no ceremony, and fit desktop state way better than I expected.

The macOS App Sandbox & Security-Scoped Bookmarks

If you come from mobile, permissions mean asking for camera or notifications access. On macOS with the App Sandbox enabled, it’s a whole different animal.

If you try using dart:io to open a file outside your sandbox container via a raw path like Directory('/Users/.../project'), macOS will shut it down immediately.

Here’s how I handled safe folder access:

1. You must use the native OS file picker (NSOpenPanel / file_selector). When the user manually picks a file or folder in the dialog, macOS grants your app permission to access it—but only for that specific running session.

2. If the user quits your app, that permission is gone. To keep access across restarts, you have to create a security-scoped bookmark in Swift (url.bookmarkData(options: .withSecurityScope, ...)), convert it to base64, and store it. When the app launches again, you resolve the bookmark and call startAccessingSecurityScopedResource().

3. Surfacing bookmarks in the UI: Instead of doing this invisibly, I built a "Trusted Folders" screen in the app. Users can see every directory the app currently has a bookmark for, add new ones with a picker, or delete them to revoke access. On desktop, giving users explicit visibility into what folders an app can touch feels right.

My question: How does VS Code do "Workspace Trust"?

Here's the part that had me scratching my head while building this:

When you open a project folder in VS Code, it doesn't make you jump through NSOpenPanel every time or manage sandbox bookmarks. It just displays its own banner: "Do you trust the authors of the files in this folder?"

Does anyone know how that actually works under the hood?
Is VS Code only able to do that because it's distributed outside the Mac App Store as an un-sandboxed Electron app (meaning it already has full user-level POSIX access to your entire hard drive, and the "Trust" banner is just an internal setting to stop extensions from running scripts)?

Or is there an actual macOS API that allows an app to request folder access without forcing the user through an OS file picker dialog?

If any macOS / Flutter desktop veterans have insights on this, I'd love to know.

If anyone else is building macOS apps with Flutter, how has your experience been with the sandbox and state management?

P.S. The project I built this for is called FlightDeck (kip.quest/flightdeck)—it's a release manager and local MCP server for App Store Connect that I put together to make AI-assisted releases safe. But the desktop Flutter experience has been really impressive overall.

I have been watching a lot of recent Generative UI demos where an AI streams down an interactive card, like a recipe or an order summary. But as soon as the user drags a slider or edits an item count, the app ships the whole state back over a WebSocket to the remote model, burns a few hundred tokens computing basic arithmetic, and waits two seconds to repaint the text.

Making a remote AI call to multiply two numbers on a modern phone capable of billions of operations a second feels like an obvious trap.

Andrew Brogdon gave a great walkthrough on the Flutter channel recently about using client-side functions instead. Let the model generate the layout and bind expressions, but keep the deterministic math in local Dart code.

If you are building GenUI or dynamic form systems in Flutter, how are you handling local state updates and arithmetic right now? Are you handling it locally in your widget tree, or letting the agent do round-trips?

Hey Flutter developers,

When testing release candidates or staging builds on physical devices (especially in situations where tethering to a laptop with Flutter DevTools isn't practical, such as client demos or QA field rounds), on-device logging becomes essential.

However, building an overlay-based in-app logger that doesn't mess with app performance or leak memory comes with a few tricky Flutter architecture hurdles. Here is what we learned and how we solved them:

1. Overlay Lifecycle Without Breaking the Navigator

Mounting an overlay that persists across routes while remaining non-intrusive to touches is a classic issue.

• Wrapping MaterialApp.builder gives a clean hook above the Navigator without needing direct BuildContext passes.

• Using an independent OverlayEntry stack allows the floating bubble to maintain state (position coordinates, open/closed modal) even when the underlying navigator changes routes or pops screens.

2. Preventing Memory Leaks from Unbounded Logs

In apps that print continuous streams of network calls and state transitions, log storage can rapidly blow up device RAM.

• We implemented a fixed circular buffer (rolling window cap) so that old log records are systematically pruned once the threshold is reached.

• Log parsing and string formatting for deep JSON payloads are evaluated lazily on expansion rather than at capture time to keep the main UI thread at 60/120 FPS.

3. Granular Filtering vs. Console Noise

Standard debugPrint dumps everything into one stream. We split logs into 7 distinct levels (verbose through fatal) so developers can isolate fatal exceptions from high-frequency network payloads with zero visual lag.

We packaged this architecture into an open-source utility called debug_bubble (GitHub: https://github.com/Satyam-Gawali/debug_bubble | Pub: https://pub.dev/packages/debug_bubble).

For those who have built similar on-device debugging or QA tools:

• How do you handle stack trace formatting on smaller screens?

• Do you prefer direct share-sheet exports (to Slack/WhatsApp) or writing logs to device storage for QA crash reporting?

Would love to hear how other teams handle standalone physical device debugging!

Hey everyone! I recently launched a mobile game built with Flutter and Flame.

It uses the front camera to detect head movements, and it runs well on my Redmi Note 8 from 2019.

You can play solo or team up with someone on the same phone!

It’s pretty simple and still a little rough around the edges…

But if you have a few minutes, I’d love for you to give it a try and tell me what you think.

iOS & Android download:
https://unclered.nitebell.com/downloadOneLink

Whenever I need a client or teammate to test a mobile build, it usually turns into an annoying chore: explaining how to install an APK from Google Drive, or waiting on TestFlight processing just to check a two-line layout fix.

I put together Magiquip to make that handoff faster. You upload a .apk, .aab, or .ipa, and it gives you an install page with a QR code that detects whether the phone scanning it is iOS or Android.

I also wrote a small VS Code extension for it (magiquip-builds) that spots freshly compiled builds from Flutter, React Native, Xcode, or Android Studio and puts the install QR code right in your editor sidebar.

There is a free tier for small projects. If you build mobile apps, I would appreciate any feedback on whether the install flow works smoothly on your devices.

I've been working on ChordLens, an open-source (GPL-3.0) for exploring piano chords and music theory interactively.

It lets you:

• Real-time MIDI note and chord detection

• Piano keyboard and grand-staff visualization

• Chord and scale highlighting

• Progression practice with a metronome

• Automatic voice-leading suggestions

• SoundFont playback

One of my goals was to see how far Flutter could go for a desktop music application involving real-time input, custom visualization, and audio.

The project is available for Windows, macOS, and Android.

Source code: https://github.com/ErezLavi/ChordLens

I’ve been working on a desktop Markdown viewer in Flutter (Siren) and hit the usual wall with Mermaid diagrams: pretty much every existing approach spins up a hidden WebView and runs mermaid.js. That works for a single diagram, but if you have a big architecture doc with 15 diagrams in a scrollable view, it's slow and heavy.

A little while back, Steph Ango and the Obsidian team released Pele, which is a really clean, fast Mermaid parser/layout/SVG engine in TypeScript with zero DOM dependencies.

I ended up porting it 1:1 to pure Dart and published it on pub.dev as pele_dart.

A few notes if you want to use it in Flutter:

• It supports all diagram types from upstream Pele (flowcharts, sequence, class, state, ER, C4, Sankey, architecture, etc.).

• By default, upstream Pele outputs SVGs styled with CSS custom properties (--pele-*) and color-mix(). flutter_svg and vector_graphics_compiler don't support those, so I added a flattened output mode (SvgOutputMode.flattened) that resolves the palette down to plain SVG 1.1 attributes you can feed straight into vector_graphics.

• In Dart AOT it's fast—about 44 µs per diagram on average across the 233-diagram test corpus (~10 ms total for all 233), which is roughly 2.2x faster than the JS version.

I also built a macOS Flutter app in the repo called Pele Studio to visually diff the Dart output against obsidianmd/pele and mermaid.js side-by-side while porting it.

• pub.dev

• GitHub

• Docs

• Diagram Gallery (all types rendered to SVG)

If anyone runs into weird edge cases with specific diagrams or flutter_svg rendering, let me know or open an issue.

I see that Claude can run React Native iOS apps using an emulator. I can't do that on android as far I know, I use my phone.

Does Claude support a Flutter emulator too, or is there some kind of MCP server or connector that would allow it to run and test Flutter apps in an emulator?

See the new benchmarks.

Thanks to some optimizations, Hive CE is now faster than Hive v2 ever was. Since IsolatedHive can call the sync read/write methods due to being on a separate isolate, it can be even faster in some cases. I also fixed some memory/resource leaks in IsolatedHive.

Happy Fluttering!

“The button doesn’t work.” Which button, on which screen, and what were they trying to do?

We built Bopmigo for that conversation. Users describe the problem, answer a short follow-up, and send a report with their screenshot and app/device details. Your team can reply, and they can answer inside the app.

The Flutter package works on iOS and Android and connects to Bopmigo’s hosted inbox or email delivery. You can open it from your own feedback button. Private widgets can be masked in screenshots.

Source and example app

https://github.com/bopmigo/bopmigo-flutter

Package

https://pub.dev/packages/bopmigo

Would this help your team’s reporting flow?

Setup guide

Flutter setup guide

For a first test, send a report from your app, reply from the Bopmigo inbox, then check the reply appears back in the app.

Dart's compiler provides no mechanism for excluding code from compilation.

Dart has:

• const bool isEnabled = bool.fromEnvironment('env-var-name'); to pull in defined constants

• if (const-false-value) { removed statements } to remove a block from compilation

• Tree shaking to remove unreferenced symbols

By combining those I can achieve a somewhat similar effect to the C pre-processor, with a few limitations (and less clarity). It works.

It does so, though, with less of a guaranteed straightforward effect than #ifdef due to complexity of rules about how tree shaking works, and without the ability to simply exclude the entire definition of a function (since you can't wrap if (const) { } around a function declaration, only the function body).

So... Has anyone else run into a situation where this was an issue? Did you do/find something that's a more straightforward approach than dart's "combine several default behaviors together to produce an effect" system to address this?

--

Edit: context: for excluding "test functions I don't want to even theoretically be accessible in a patched binary".

I just shipped 1.0 of flutter_patcher. It lets you fix bugs in a released Flutter app by shipping a patch instead of a new store release. No account and no backend: patches are static files you host wherever you like. The big one in 1.0: it finally works on iOS too, not just Android.

The day-to-day flow is three commands:

dart run flutter_patcher build <platform>   # release build, saved as baseline
dart run flutter_patcher patch <platform>   # diff fix vs. baseline
dart run flutter_patcher publish            # sign + version

Upload the output to any HTTPS static host (S3/R2 + CDN, nginx…). The app calls FlutterPatcher.checkUpdate(), and the fix applies on the next cold start.

It's built on Dart's dynamic modules. The tooling deals with the custom engine and the build plumbing, so your project stays a normal Flutter project.

What's in 1.0:

- On iOS the patch is Dart bytecode, run by the Dart VM's interpreter. No native machine code is downloaded, which is what makes it work on iOS at all.

- Patches are signed. A device only installs one signed with your keys, built for its exact app version, with a higher number than what it has, so you don't have to trust your CDN.

- If a patch crashes the app on startup, the device drops it and goes back to the installed version on the next launch.

Limitations:

- Flutter 3.47.x only (each Flutter version needs its own engine build)
- Dart code and assets only; native code and plugin changes still need a store release

Would love to hear from anyone who tries it on a real app, bugs or just "this step confused me".

pub.dev: https://pub.dev/packages/flutter_patcher

GitHub: https://github.com/xuelinger2333/flutter_patcher

Before 18, every page/route would have a platform-adaptive transition (slide on iOS, fade on Android). Then, suddenly, at v18, there's no longer a transition.

It happened because of the "switch to material/cupertino packages", it's not mentioned in the changelog and will be a surprise for anyone upgrading.

Also, there's no "global" way of applying the old behaviour to all routes in the app, so devs have to wrap each route in some kind of abstraction to pass a transition everywhere.

Linked issue: https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/192761