4 steps to start building apps with Flutter

As a front-end developer, I was always curious about mobile apps and wanted to build one. In the last years, I was testing multiple frameworks from Ionic to React native and to be honest, I was never satisfied. Until one day by accident, I tried FLUTTER and this happened:

Flutter is Google’s UI toolkit for building beautiful, natively compiled applications for mobile, web, and desktop from a single codebase.

From Flutter website

Just reading this sentence blew my mind and I was in. After two months playing around with the framework, I would say it’s the one that will take over in the next years for sure. Let’s jump and see how to start with it.

1 – Download the Flutter SDK

Download the stable version and put it in as a PATH environment variable. The download link is here.

2 – Run Flutter Doctor

flutter doctor

This command is the most important one as it checks your environment and displays a report of the status of your Flutter installation. Do not forget to check the output carefully, to be able to know what is still missing.

3 – Start Coding

import 'package:flutter/material.dart';

void main() async {
  runApp(
    MaterialApp(
      debugShowCheckedModeBanner: false,
      home: Scaffold(
        body: MyApp(),
      ),
    ),
  );
}

class MyApp extends StatefulWidget {
  @override
  _MyAppState createState() => _MyAppState();
}

class _MyAppState extends State<MyApp> {
  @override
  Widget build(BuildContext context) {
    return Text(
           'Click me!',
           style: TextStyle(
                  fontSize: 60.0,
                  fontWeight: FontWeight.bold,
                ),
           );
  }
}

4 – Enjoy it