Good artists copy, great artists steal.
Android Development with Flutter
Over the pandemic, I finally took the time to learn how to make a mobile phone app. After reading several articles about the different ways this could be done (native development, React Native, Xamarin, etc.) I settled on using Google’s fresh new (at the time at least) framework for cross-platform app development: Flutter.
Flutter is a very straight-forward, Dart-based framework that offered hot-reload, JIT compilation, and a very well-thought-out library of “widgets” that would let me beautify my app. After familiarizing myself with the basics, I wanted to make a simple app with a very distinct look.
The no name® Appeal
I’ve always loved the no name® brand identity. It’s clean, punchy, delightfully mellow, and shockingly easy to recreate.
I also loved the subtly snarky “tag lines” the marketing team put under certain products. A no name® brand water bottle might be labelled:
water bottle
for drinking
With this identity in mind, and using the closest font to Helvetica I could find, I coded up a simple Android app!
Pictures
Below are some screenshots of the app running on a real world Galaxy S6!
Videos
And here are some videos of the app in action (also taken from my old Galaxy S6)! Functionality includes making to-do items, checking and unchecking them, editing items, and deleting them ✅✅✅.
Getting the App
This app was only made to work on Androids since I don’t own a Mac to use Xcode (so ironically I can’t use it on my own iPhone 🙃). Right now the only version of this that exists is a private APK in my working Flutter directory, clocking in at 5,107 KB.
For the sake of legal safety, I never hosted this app on the Google Play Store. The app is small enough that I could host the download on this website through GitHub Pages, but I found in other testing that modern android phones didn’t love downloading unregistered APKs from random websites.
The eventual plan is to host the APK on my GitHub itself along with the whole project, so keen readers can jump through all the hoops to get it if they need. Right now, the codebase is a mess (and huge because Flutter), but I will edit this post when I do eventually put it up!
Closing Thoughts
I learned so much by making this app, though I know I have a lot more to learn still. Fun fact, This app also served as my final project for CS50x (a free, high-quality beginner programming course offered by Harvard which I highly recommend!).
For simple projects, you don’t really need to think about architectures (like MVC) and barely need to think about good programming practices. Although the simplicity and speed of development is nice, it really limits how much functionality you can add or if you ever want to add anyone to your team. As the old saying goes:
Go fast alone, go far together
I hope to return to making apps again some day when I have time (maybe a simple game next time 🤔).