Flutter is a powerful framework for building beautiful and engaging mobile apps. However, with so many available packages, it can be overwhelming to know which ones are right for your project. In this blog post, I will share a variety of Flutter packages that I personally think essential to help you streamline your development process and build feature-rich apps.
State Management, Dependency Injection, and Routing:
Get
Get is a state management, routing, and dependency injection package for Flutter. It is known for being easy to use and promoting clean code. Some of the features of Get include reactive state management, automatic dependency injection, and the ability to navigate without context.
Riverpod
Riverpod is a reactive caching and data-binding framework for Flutter. It simplifies working with asynchronous code by automatically handling errors and loading states. It also separates the logic from the UI and ensures code is testable and reusable.
UI Enhancement & Animations:
flutter_native_splash
This package is used to customize the splash screen in a Flutter app. It allows you to set the background color and image of the splash screen. The package also supports dark mode and platform-specific options.
carousel_slider
This package can be used to create a carousel slider widget for displaying images or text in Flutter apps. The widget supports infinite scrolling and allows for customization of the child widgets.
introduction_screen
It helps you create an introduction screen for your app. The package includes a number of widgets that can be used to create the introduction screen, and it is easy to use and customizable.
flutter_custom_clippers
It provides custom clippers to help achieve various shapes in Flutter apps. The package includes a number of different clippers, including SideCutClipper, MultipleRoundedCurveClipper, and MultiplePointedEdgeClipper. Each clipper can be used to create a specific shape by clipping a widget. For example, the SideCutClipper can be used to create a widget with a diagonal cut on one side.
animations
This package provides pre-built animations for Flutter applications. It includes Material motion, a set of transition patterns that helps users navigate an app. The package also includes common animation patterns like container transform, shared axis, fade through, and fade.
flutter_animate
It allows you to add animations to your widgets. It includes pre-built effects like fade, scale, slide, align, flip, blur, shake, shimmer, shadows, crossfades, follow path, and color effects. It also allows you to apply animated GLSL fragment shaders to widgets.
flame
It is a minimalist Flutter game engine that provides a nice set of somewhat independent modules you can choose from. It is Dart 3 compatible and works on multiple platforms including Android, iOS, Linux, macOS, web, and Windows. Some of the key features of Flame include a game loop, a component/object system, effects and particles, collision detection, gesture and input handling, images, animations, sprites, and sprite sheets, and general utilities to make development easier.
responsive_framework
It helps you make Flutter apps responsive. The package includes widgets that help developers build responsive apps for mobile, desktop, and website layouts. The core functionality is achieved through the use of breakpoints, which define different screen sizes and the corresponding UI behavior. Developers can define custom breakpoints and use them to control how their UI displays at different screen sizes.
Networking & Data Storage:
dio
Dio is a powerful HTTP networking package for Flutter and Dart. It features interceptors, transformers, and error handling. Dio can be used to make GET, POST, and other types of requests. It can also be used to upload files.
hive
Hive is a NoSQL database for mobile and web apps. It is lightweight, fast, and easy to use. Some of Hive’s features are strong encryption, cross-platform support, and the ability to store objects.
graphql_flutter
It brings the features of a modern GraphQL client to Flutter. It provides widgets and an API for interacting with GraphQL servers. It is easy to use and well documented.
cached_network_image
This package is used to load and cache images from the internet in Flutter apps. It also supports placeholder and error widgets, which can be used to display content while the image is loading or if there is an error.
socket_io_client
It enables real-time communication between a web or Flutter application and a Socket.IO server. You can use it for features such as chatting, online games etc. It is available for various platforms including Android, iOS, Linux, macOS, and web browsers.
web_socket_channel
It is a collection of classes that enable communication between web applications and servers using WebSockets. This is similar to socket io client. It provides a consistent API across different platforms (Android, iOS, Linux, macOS, web, and Windows).
json_serializable
It helps you automatically generate code to convert Dart classes to and from JSON. The package uses annotations to mark classes and fields for conversion. It can also handle custom types and encoding.
Forms & User Input:
flutter_form_builder
It helps you create forms in Flutter. The package helps remove boilerplate code, reuse validation, react to changes, and collect user input. It includes common pre-made form fields.
flutter_typeahead
It allows you to create a typeahead (autocomplete) text input field for your Flutter applications. It is highly customizable, meaning that developers can change many aspects of how the typeahead field looks and behaves.
Text & Markdown:
google_fonts
This package allows you to use fonts from Google Fonts in your Flutter app. It supports HTTP fetching, caching, and asset bundling. Fonts can be downloaded from fonts.google.com and placed in an asset folder in your pubspec.yaml file.
flutter_markdown
It is a renderer for Markdown, a lightweight markup language, into a Flutter widget containing a rich text representation. It supports the original format, but no inline HTML.
readmore
It allows you to expand and collapse text dynamically. It is useful for situations where you have a large amount of text that you don't want to overwhelm the user with all at once.
auto_size_text
It allows you to set the font size of a Text widget to automatically adjust to fit its container. This is useful for situations where you want the text to always be visible within the available space.
Navigation & Deep Linking:
flutter_launcher_icons
This package simplifies the process of updating launcher icons for Flutter apps. It supports Android, iOS, macOS, and Windows platforms. It also supports generating icons for web apps.
uni_links
It allows you to handle universal links on both Android and iOS. Remember when you click a link on mobile and it offers to open the link with an app other than a browser, this package is for that.
firebase_dynamic_links
It is an app solution for creating and handling links across multiple platforms. This is similar to uni_links package but the links are setup by Firebase which makes it easier.
go_router
It is a declarative routing package for Flutter that uses the Router API to provide a convenient, url-based API for navigating between different screens. It supports a number of features including: defining URL patterns, navigation using a URL, handling deep links, and more.
infinite_scroll_pagination
It helps us lazily load and display pages of items as the user scrolls down the screen. It is designed to be unopinionated, extensible, and highly customizable. This means that it can be used with any state management approach, layout, or API. The package also provides built-in widgets for common layouts, such as GridView, SliverGrid, ListView, and SliverList. Developers can also create custom layouts if needed.
Development & Testing:
mockito
It allows you to create mock objects for testing purposes. It provides APIs for Fakes, Mocks, behavior verification, and stubbing. Mockito is inspired by Mockito, a popular mocking framework for Java.
in_app_update
It enables In App Updates on Android using the official Android APIs. It cannot be used on iOS devices though.
flutter_gen
It helps you generate Dart code to replace string-based APIs for assets, fonts, and colors in your Flutter application. This can help to improve the maintainability and readability of your code.
freezed
It is used to generate code for immutable classes. It is used to simplify data-class/union/pattern-matching/cloning. Freezed achieves this by generating a number of methods including a copyWith method, a toString override, and operator == and hashCode overrides.
sentry_flutter
This is official sentry package. It helps track errors and performance in Flutter apps. It supports various Flutter targets through native SDKs. It captures errors in the native layer, including Java/Kotlin/C/C++ for Android and Objective-C/Swift for iOS.
logger
It helps you print logs to the console. It can be used to print different levels of logs, such as trace, debug, info, warning, error, and fatal. You can also customize the output of the logs, such as by adding colors or timestamps.
Other:
permission_handler
It allows you to request and check permissions on Android and iOS devices. It provides a cross-platform API and also allows you to open the device's app settings if a user denies a permission. On Android, you can show a rationale for why you are requesting a permission.
flutter_inappwebview
It allows you to add an inline webview, use a headless webview, and open an in-app browser window. The plugin is compatible with Dart 3, and supports Android, iOS, macOS, and web platforms.
uuid
It helps you generate Universally Unique Identifiers (UUIDs). The package supports generating different versions of UUIDs including v1, v4, and v5. It also supports draft versions 6, 7, and 8. The package is well documented and includes examples.
share_plus
It allows you to share content from your Flutter app via the platform's share dialog. It wraps the ACTION_SEND Intent on Android and UIActivityViewController on iOS.
This plugin supports sharing text, files, and links. You can also specify a subject for the share and a custom share position origin for iPad users.
This post has only scratched the surface of the amazing Flutter package ecosystem. With countless options available, the possibilities for building unique and engaging apps are endless. So, I encourage you to dive deeper into the ones that pique your interest, and unleash your creativity to build fantastic Flutter apps!
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