Your First Flutter App: An App From Scratch
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Flutter development can be done on Windows, macOS, Linux, and even Chrome OS. You can target Android, web, and desktop on each, but macOS is the only platform from which you can target iOS apps, so we’ll be using macOS in this course.
There are a fair number of steps needed to get your system ready for Flutter development. These include installing the Fluter SDK, and then both Xcode and Android Studio. Xcode is needed to build your Flutter app for iOS. Unfortunately, if you don’t have access to a mac, you won’t be able to build iOS apps. Like Xcode, Android Studio is requirement to build Android apps but Android Studio works on a variety of platforms whereas Xcode just works on macOS.
For editing your Flutter code, people typically use either Android Studio or the Visual Studio Code editor from Microsoft. In this course and throughout the Flutter learning path in general, we’ll be using Visual Studio Code to do all our code development. You are welcome to use Android Studio if you’re already familiar with it. You’ll just need to adapt some instructions in the course for Android Studio.
Flutter also comes with a few tools to assist with Flutter development. One such tool is called Flutter Doctor. Flutter doctor will analyze your Flutter installation and inform you of any problems with your installation. If you find yourself running into some obscure flutter issues, a good starting point is to run flutter doctor to make sure your installation wasn’t corrupted.
In the following episodes, I’ll walk you through following the Flutter install steps for Windows and macOS. Unfortunately, installing on Linux or ChromeOS is a little beyond the scope of this course. Thankfully, the Flutter development site has plenty of documentation walking you through the entire process. It can be a little technical so if you get stuck, go to the flutter developer site and click on the community tab. You’ll find a whole host of options to assist you with any installation problems.
That said, if you get stuck at any point installing Flutter on Windows or macOS, please be sure to ask a question in the forums for this episode, and we’ll do all we can to help out.