Flutter Packages and Plugins - A Look Under the Hood

How does one Flutter plugin support Android, iOS, and web? It's not a single package, but three. Discover the power of federated plugins.

#1about 4 minutes

A brief introduction to the Flutter framework

Flutter is a cross-platform UI toolkit from Google that uses a widget-based architecture and compiles to native code for high performance.

#2about 8 minutes

Understanding and using Flutter packages for code reuse

Packages are reusable units of Dart code that can be added to a project using the `flutter pub add` command and are defined in the `pubspec.yaml` file.

#3about 11 minutes

Using method channels to call native platform code

Plugins use asynchronous method channels to communicate between Dart code and native platform APIs, enabling access to hardware features like the battery level.

#4about 5 minutes

Creating a standalone plugin package from a template

The `flutter create` command with the plugin template generates a skeleton project for building a shareable plugin with a public API and an example app.

#5about 8 minutes

The federated architecture for multi-platform plugins

A federated plugin separates the app-facing API, a platform interface, and platform-specific implementations, allowing developers to independently add or replace platform support.

#6about 4 minutes