In this Flutter Video Tutorial, we take a look at three general utility plugins; connectivity, battery and device info. These plugins are a part of the Flutter Fire GitHub Repository; a repository of plugins that are maintained by the flutter team. All of the plugins make use of Platform Messages which are asynchronous messages that are sent to and from the host platform. Through these messages, Flutter gains access to APIs that are are part of the Host platform's ecosystem. This includes hardware APIs, operating system applications and drivers.
The Connectivity Plugin gives us an API that lets us check the status of the internet connectivity of the device that our application is installed on. This can be very useful because it allows us to throttle some of the features in our application in response to changes in the internet speed and availability. With this library, we can make sure that our application does not eat up too much data.
The Battery Plugin is similar to the connectivity plugin, except it gives us an API which lets us communicate with the battery state of the device. We can use this feature to build out applications that directly relate to battery power. Again, we are able to use this to dynamically change how are applications react to the changes in the device's battery life.
The final plugin we looked at in this tutorial is the Device Info plugin. The device info plugin gives us access to various different pieces of information that are unique to the device that the application is running on. This includes the brand, model number, id and fingerprint. We can use these different properties to change some of the features of our application and make it so that the application can work better on older devices. We can also make it so that the application provides alternative features for devices that are lacking specific pieces of hardware.
The source code for this project can be found here
The Flutter Fire Repository can be found here
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- Finishing our Calculator Application with Dart's Flutter Framework
Movie Searcher Application
- Building a Movie Searcher with RxDart and SQLite in Dart's Flutter Framework (Part 1)
- Building a Movie Searcher with RxDart and SQLite in Dart's Flutter Framework (Part 2)
- Building a Movie Searcher with RxDart and SQLite in Dart's Flutter Framework (Part 3, Final)
Minesweeper Game
