Posts

If you’ve spent any amount of time developing mobile apps, you’re probably well aware of how public “private” data really is. Cloud databases like , , and protect their front gates with robust security measures like authentication keys, security rules, user roles, and field-specific restrictions. From the outside, these databases are fortresses with more than enough artillery to prevent people from seeing each other’s data. The issue however, is that the castle-keepers can see everything that gets brought into the castle. Your name. Your contact info. Your personal information. It all exists on a database that is not absolutely private and that should give you pause. Below is a screenshot from a test app I made using Google’s Firestore as a database and yeah…as the owner of the database I can peruse the user records at my leisure. ...

Build this Blog Medium. Hashnode. Wordpress. Ghost. Log Rocket. There are a thousand blogging platforms that want your content, knowledge, and time. I say nay! In this article I’ll lay out all the steps you need to build this exact website and host your content on GitHub pages. What you’ll get: A blogging website hosted on GitHub The Hugo PaperMod theme Menus to filter content by categories and tags Full text search Tracking with Google Analytics ...

If your app ain’t animating, users ain’t engaging. It’s a simple law of mobile app development that gets less attention than it deserves. Users want the impression that your app is alive — a living, breathing creation that does more than respond to taps and scrolls. Dynamically changing gradients, bouncing dots, and widgets that push at their boundaries like animals in a cage all give your app a personality that users will be thinking about long after they lock their screens. ...

Displaying Videos in Flutter from a URL With the Stacked architecture In this article, I will be explaining how to display a video directly from a URL in Flutter (although any video URL will work). If you’re interested in saving videos to Cloud Storage, check out my previous article on that exact subject. Uploading Images to Cloud Storage Using Flutter If you do have videos in Cloud Storage, I’m assuming you’ll eventually want to display them. Maybe you need to show a video thumbnail on one screen and then the full video on another. Maybe you want to embed a video in a tutorial to explain how an app feature works. Whatever it is, your question is the same: How do I display my video? ...

Enums were good. Now they’re great. Flutter 3 Flutter 3.0 was announced at Google IO yesterday and as can be expected from a major version jump, there were a lot of new features to dig through. A few of the big ones: Stable support for macOS and Linux apps Improved Firebase integration Material 3 support Foldable phone support iOS release improvements Performance improvements for the web Theme extensions You can read more about the full release in the announcement here and if you’re someone that wants to see everything that was added, check out the release notes. ...

Flutter Newbies Start Here If you’re new to Flutter development, I’d recommend starting with something a little less involved. I used this book to learn the Flutter language: Beginning Flutter: A Hands On Guide to App Development And this one to get started with mobile app development: Android Studio 3.4 Development Essentials — Kotlin Edition: Developing Android Apps Using Android Studio 3.4, Kotlin and Jetpack …And Let’s Go Good morning, afternoon, and evening to all the Flutter developers in the world and welcome to the blog post that’s going to make you love Google’s cross-platform development language more than you already do! For those of you that aren’t familiar with the number one rising language for mobile development, get familiar. This language is perfect for creating beautiful mobile applications for Android, iOS, and web, and it has a community that is expanding like California wildfires. ...

If you’d like to distribute your Flutter app to iOS-using testers via Firebase Distribution, you’ll need to build IPA files. IPA files are simply iOS Application files that behave like APK or app bundles on Android. Unlike APK or app bundles however, you can’t just run a flutter build command and create an IPA. Build App Bundle: flutter build appbundle Build APK: flutter build apk This article will show you the fastest way to build an IPA for your Flutter app. ...

Google’s Cloud Firestore is a tool that should be in every mobile app developer’s tool belt. The flexible and scalable database that it provides is unlike anything a coder could create alone and if your app is designed for a global audience, there aren’t many solutions like it. Plus, there’s a Flutter package ( cloud_firestore) that’s designed to make Flutter and Flame play nicely together. Unfortunately, there is one downside. The tool isn’t free to use and every read/write transaction your app makes with the Firestore database is counted against your daily quota (50,000 daily reads and 20,000 daily writes for the free tier plan). Therefore, it’s essential you design your database with these usage limits in mind…otherwise, your dreams of creating a profitable mobile app will be stamped out like a flame. ...

The Legend of the Multi-Colored TabBar A majority of popular mobile apps on the app store use a tried and true navigation scheme: the Bottom Navigation Bar. The idea is to have all 4 or 5 of the app’s main activities visible and within thumb’s reach. If you do a quick browse through the apps on your phone, you’ll find this pattern is far and away the most used. Bottom Navigation Bar Apps: ...

Firebase is awesome and I’ve used it in more apps than I can count (assuming I can only count to about 20). It has authentication, data storage, an intuitive querying SDK, and plenty of other features that most mobile app developers find themselves wanting at one point or another. So why replace it? I asked myself the same question many times and more than once my answer was “Don’t”. It had just about everything I needed…and then I was asked to implement End-to-End Encryption (E2EE) in a social media app. I managed to do it based on this Stack Overflow answer but the solution was complicated and if a user ever wanted to change devices they needed to encrypt their old private key, save it to Firestore, change devices, download the encrypted private key, and then decrypt it. There were a few other difficulties (some that I’m still working through) and I finally began to rethink my devotion to the god named Google. ...