Why Flutter on Desktop? Background story

Why Flutter on Desktop? Background story

Mar 20, 2022ยท

4 min read

I wanted to create this website to extend and improve my blog: Flutter and Other Experiments where in those years I wrote articles on Flutter and my side-project experiments. With the Flutter on Desktop project, I want to dedicate myself even more to Flutter by creating dedicated and freely available resources only for Flutter so that it can help as many people as possible, with any level of experience, who want to approach Flutter or want to deepen their knowledge.

The articles published on this site will have different topics, complexities, and targets to embrace a very broad target of developers, project managers, or simply curious. I am not a Flutter expert and I certainly have a lot to learn but I am sure that this project and the journey that follows will make me deepen many aspects and will lead me and the reader to delve into this fantastic world.

When you teach someone there are two people learning

DISCLAIMER: I am not tied to the Flutter team and everything I will write is the result of my research and insights

Why specifically for desktop?

As many of you know Flutter is an open-source framework by Google for building beautiful, natively compiled, multi-platform applications from a single codebase which has seen its initial releases focus on mobile applications for Android and iOS declared stable in version 1.0 announced on December 4, 2018 subsequently with the release of version 2.0 on March 3, 2021 the development of apps targeting the Web was declared stable and production-ready. And recently Flutter version 2.10 announced on February 3, 2022 brings the stable release of Windows support. Therefore, only macOS and Linux are missing.

This site will focus specifically on Flutter for desktop as it is the last piece to complete to embrace true multi-platform and Flutter's promise to develop applications that can run on 6 different platforms: Android, iOS, Web, Windows, macOS, and Linux. Flutter has proven to be more than a viable alternative for developing mobile applications on Android and iOS and more and more companies are turning to Flutter to develop some of their apps or have already switched to only Flutter like Very Good Ventures. In the Desktop field, the first important projects developed with Flutter are starting to appear: FlutterFlow, Rive, Rows, Ubuntu Desktop Installer, Firmware Updater and I want to do my part too by creating resources to support these developments.

The use cases of Flutter on the desktop are many, I illustrate a few here:

  • Porting of mobile applications to the desktop platform: applications already released on Android and iOS can have their counterpart on the desktop to take advantage of a larger screen and inputs such as keyboard and mouse, especially useful for productivity applications;
  • Native desktop applications of which for now there is only the Web version with a significant increase in performance, access to the file system and peripherals of the computer on which they run;
  • Development of applications designed primarily for large screens and inputs such as mouse and keyboard that can support Windows, macOS, and Linux;
  • Porting and development of applications for a desktop operating system that currently only exists on another system. Think for example of applications present only for Windows that could be written or rewritten to also support macOS and Linux.

What resources will be posted?

  • Mainly articles will be posted in various forms: guides, insights, tutorials, experiments and all the code will be made available freely on GitHub;
  • All the articles published will be shared on DesktopFlutter on Twitter and they will also be shared on Reddit, LinkedIn, Daily.dev to give as much visibility as possible to the contents to reach as many people as possible;
  • In-depth analyzes are also in the works in the form of diagrams and images on the Layout of desktop applications that we use every day and how these can be realized in Flutter.

See you in the next article and in the meantime Happy Fluttering ๐Ÿ’™

The computer icon on the cover images is made by: Computer icons created by vectorsmarket15 - Flaticon

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