Category: Flutter

the very definition of insanity – trying to make google flutter work

whbeebe

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.

I’m giving up on Flutter. After finally getting everything installed, configured, and mastering the basic tutorials (see here), I managed to get several demo apps running on the iPhone X simulator. And then, with the release of Flutter 0.11.13, it all went to hell in a handbasket. Flutter doctor is now producing the following:

Doctor summary (to see all details, run flutter doctor -v):[✓] Flutter (Channel beta, v0.11.13, on Mac OS X 10.14.1 18B75, locale en-US)[✓] Android toolchain - develop for Android devices (Android SDK 27.0.3)[!] iOS toolchain - develop for iOS devices (Xcode 10.1)✗ Verify that all connected devices have been paired with this computer in Xcode.  If all devices have been paired, libimobiledevice and ideviceinstaller may require updating.  To update with Brew, run:brew updatebrew uninstall --ignore-dependencies libimobiledevicebrew uninstall --ignore-dependencies usbmuxdbrew install --HEAD usbmuxdbrew unlink usbmuxdbrew link usbmuxdbrew install --HEAD libimobiledevicebrew install ideviceinstaller[✓] Android Studio (version 3.2)[✓] IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate Edition (version 2018.3)[✓] Connected device (3 available)

I followed the brew directions not once, but twice. I then went and deleted the entire flutter folder, downloaded the current zip file, unzipped it, and ran Flutter doctor again. Same issue.

I have neither the time nor the patience to go trolling through fora on the Internet trying to find the magic solution. I’ve got better things to do with my time. So, here’s what I’m going to do. I’m deleting Flutter again, and when it’s finally officially released, maybe I’ll try it again. But until then I’ll stick with XCode on my MBP.

Update 4 December

Google announced the release of Flutter 1.0 today. Downloaded it, unzipped it, same issues as with the beta. Deleted it again.

getting started with flutter on macos mojave, part 4 final

whbeebe

I’ve reached the end of the Flutter introduction, having produced an “app” that will supposedly work equally well on Android and iOS. Nothing out of the way to report, as part two of the exercise was clear and correct. I even went back and removed the code that produced the “Welcome to Flutter” header. Now the app is cleaner looking with only one header.

The good news is how so many different parts worked together to accomplish this: XCode (the Apple iPhone simulator), VS Code (Microsoft’s powerful open-source editor with plugins), and Flutter (Google’s development tools with additional support via Brew). If you dig a little deeper into how VS Code is built, you’ll see that it’s built on the Electron framework which is itself based on Node.js and Angular. So there’s a lot of integration of disparate languages and supporting tools into a non-trivial cohesive working whole. I’m suitably impressed.

Unfortunately for me, I couldn’t test how this looks on an Android device. I couldn’t get the Android emulator to work from the command line, even though I powered up Android Studio and used it to install SDK support for Android 9/Pie. Using Android Studio I also started the Android Virtual Device manager to create a Pixel 2 XL Android device to simulate, but unfortunately not the current top end, the Pixel 3 XL. This apparent lack of latest device support, along with the inability to launch the emulator from the command line (required if using VS Code to develop), almost makes the use of Flutter a pointless exercise, at least for me.

Yes, I was able to “develop” the app (or act as a code copying monkey from web page into the source code with the larger blocks of code). And it was interesting to see it run flawlessly on the iPhone XS Max emulator with the latest iOS version (12.1 as of 30 October). So there was that. I was also exposed to an alternative method for writing apps, which involved Javascript/Dart, so that was also a good thing. It really is good to try alternatives.

But being able to easily, seamlessly, develop for both Android and iOS on the same computer (running macOS in this case), that was a failure for me. And in order to do that kind of development you need to work on macOS, because you won’t run the Apple iPhone simulator on Windows 10. Or not that I’m aware of. And possibly solving the problem by developing within Android Studio instead of VS Code is a non-starter with me, unless I were being paid to do this, and then I would (might) begrudgingly switch. But on my own nickel, nope.

Prior Posts

getting started with flutter on macos mojave
getting started with flutter on macos mojave, part 2
getting started with flutter on macos mojave, part 3