My First Flutter App of 2022

You read that title right. This year I have a goal of uploading 12 apps. Giving me 1 month for each one.

My first app is a ‘Countdown Timer App’. Simple enough. You put a name and date, choose some styling options and it will countdown until that event happens.

I knew I wanted to create the app to run on both iOS and Android and trying to learn both native languages and nuances would not be fun to hit my goal. Instead I decided to write my app in flutter. With previous experience building some basic UI’s with no functionality I set out to build this app.

First I needed to have a starting ground. So with pen and paper I quickly drew out what the app should look like which got tiring pretty quickly and I eventually decided to open up a Figma and start designing it there.

This is what I created pretty quickly. It wasn’t going to be final or even complete but it was a starting ground. Opening up my terminal and starting a new flutter project was easy.flutter create countdowns

It’s a pretty simple command and while I would love to sit here and explain to you all of the code and background, how about you just check out the repository. It’s all open source and you can use it as a reference.

What I would like to focus on are some of the things that I learned in this process.

• Navigation in the app
• Storing data globally using the provider package
• Saving information to storage for retrieving between sessions
• Changing themes for both light and dark mode
• Creating the app icons as resources using — https://appicon.co
• Creating mockups for the app store using — https://studio.app-mockup.com
• Uploading to both iOS and Android stores

Some of these topics provided more challenging than others and somehow IMO uploading to Google Play Store was a bit more challenging than Apple but it all finally starting clicking and coming together.

Suffice to say that we are here at the end of the first month and we have a fully functioning app on both Apple’s App Store and Google’s Play Store. There has also been updates to them to fix a few bugs here and there and some UI changes as well.

Best Regards,
Chris Stayte

Download The Apps Here

iOS - https://apps.apple.com/us/app/countdowns-chris-stayte/id1603744166

Android — https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.chrisstayte.countdowns&hl=en&gl=US