My first month at a Flutter low-code startup
Today marks the first month of my job as a software engineer at FlutterFlow, a startup working on a low-code/no-code app builder using Flutter. I want to share my experience so far as well as what I have done during the past month.
Our company has less than 20 people, most of which work remotely. However, I am amazed by how fast we are bringing new features to our FlutterFlow app builder every week. I tried FlutterFlow about a year ago and wasn’t very impressed, but the app builder has now turned out to be truly amazing (although still at its early stage). It is trying to be a fully-fledged app builder, instead of just a UI design tool. To demonstrate the power of FlutterFlow, we recently hosted the FlutterFlow games hackathon where people built some very interesting games, and the annual FlutterFlow conference. In order to better develop our product, we gather extensive feedback from our users within our app, through the FlutterFlow community, as well as through weekly one-to-one meetings with our users.
Now let’s talk about what I have done during my first month.
The Pin Code widget
My first task was to implement the pin_code_fields package into FlutterFlow. This package has a ton of customizations and very nice animations. Now the benefit of using FlutterFlow is that you can visually design the pin code widget, integrate it with the theme colors of your app, and then get the generated code. As time goes by, we will keep adding high-quality widgets to suit more people’s needs. And if the built-in ones are not enough, you can always add custom code which can be any widget.
Enhanced drag-and-drop support
Another feature I worked on is enhanced drag-and-drop support. Previously when you drag and drop a widget onto the canvas, it stays there forever (technically you use the widget tree on the left to move it around, but it is less visual). This is obviously not ideal as you might want to drag some widget you just spent the last 5 minutes working on to a different location on the canvas. Now you can do it freely and visually.
SliverAppBar support
You can now use SliverAppBar in your FlutterFlow project! I remembered when trying FlutterFlow for the first time there were only a few widgets supported and now even advanced widgets like SliverAppBar are supported.
Horizontal scroll of the canvas
As we recently added support for web & desktop, design for larger screens makes more sense now. However, if you are on a smaller screen, you’ll have to really zoom out to see the entire canvas. I have added a horizontal scrollbar to let users scroll through the entire canvas.
More actions
You can now define scroll to beginning/end actions for scrollable widgets. You can also define send email/SMS and phone call actions. The cool thing about actions is that you can either provide a specific value or use variables for the email address, phone number, message body, etc. Making a contact app is going to be a breeze.
More list variables
You can now use the List type when defining firebase security rules, or passing parameters between different pages. And there are already a lot of places in FlutterFlow that accept List type parameters. Again, FlutterFlow is trying to be a powerful app builder.
Crashlytics
You can now enable Firebase crashlytics in your app, with just one click in your app settings panel. This is also true for a lot of other services, like Google Analytics, Stripe, and Algolia, to name a few.
Conclusion
These are just the updates from my side. Our team has worked out a lot more useful feature updates over the past month. To name a few, better API support, conditional logic, and secure local state. Check out the official Flutterflow Twitter and LinkedIn for more detailed information!
I feel like FlutterFlow has a lot of potentials as it puts itself at a very strategic place in the no-code/low-code market. Website builders have been around for around a decade now and have sort of matured. But good app builders are still hard to find. If an app builder is based on native framework then it is going to be really hard to develop. If an app builder is based on web technology then the performance could be a hit or miss. Flutter is gradually overcoming these two issues and FlutterFlow is benefiting a lot from the development of Flutter.
I can’t imagine what exciting features will be implemented in FlutterFlow within the next year. If you are also interested, try FlutterFlow out at https://flutterflow.io/.
