Everything you need to know about Flutter Europe 2020
By: Florent Champigny
Tags: Design, Flutter, Android, Mobile, UX

Flutter Europe is an initiative driven by European Flutter Communities to gather every passionate and learn how to create beautiful apps! The main goal is to share knowledge, improve skills and expand the community. This conference gave us the opportunity to meet the most recognizable Flutter developers from Europe and talk with some of them.

The framework is targeting mobile, desktop and web platforms with a single codebase. And it just works! It is now the most popular UI portable framework for the ambient computing world, and we could feel the hype during those two days.

Because it is a new cross platform framework, going full Flutter in companies is still quite rare. Only a few companies went all the way. The Flutter Europe conference was the right place to meet some of those companies. They all came with precious and strategic advices, talks and demos to convince our clients that choosing Flutter is a win-win situation that we have to take part in.

During those two days, we attended several talks around Flutter of course. Some talks were more interesting than others, and this article will highlight those that caught our attention.

Building Voice-First Flutter apps

Elaine Dias Batista, a french 🇫🇷 developer at SFEIR, showed us how to easily add voice commands to a Flutter application.

To add voice control on an app, you will have to pick libraries to handle

Wake word detection, as “Ok Google” Speech-To-Text, transform a voice into a literal String Natural Language Processing, trying to find the intention of thee user Then you can perform programmatically the action on your app And optionally, answer by voice response, using a Text-To-Speech SDK

The implementation can depend on the platform where your application will run (android / iOS), because some SDK like Siri are only available on one platform.

But a lot of SDK are available on Flutter, some are cloud-based, some are bridges to native SDK, but all of them work perfectly with Flutter!

She finished her talk by showing us a live demo of an application she adapted adding a voice control to switch to Dark Theme, impressive!

Bring Flutter to web

Rihanna Kedir, a Google Developer Exert on web technologies showed us what are the possibilities of FlutterWeb. The first use-case is to give the customer access to the application without having to download it from a store, but by just giving him access to an http link. It can be enforced by adding the Progressive Web App concept inside the Flutter’s project.

Another great use-case shown is to perform showcases of our app by directly adding a sample of the real application directly inside the static webpage, instead of a simple video or GIF. With this you’ll surely have a WOW effect!

This is a killer feature of Flutter, now it can really run everywhere, the sky’s the limit!

Flutter at work / Is Flutter ready for enterprise-grade applications / How to convince business to Flutter? Real-life cases

Flutter is a new technology, and like anything new, it divides thoughts. Developers will gain in productivity due to the power of the framework, but how to convince customers to embark on the Flutter adventure? This is a question that many companies are asking themselves, and which is currently the #1 obstacle to the adoption of this tool.

First of all, just explain to them why Flutter is not as any MultiPlatform language or Native SDK, Flutter is:

Simple, Productive, Cost efficient and Robust!

Time is a critical factor

For many companies, time is the main factor in the success of a project. And as we all know, time management is strongly linked to money management.

A developer carried out the 4 project natively on Android and iOS, then in React Native, in Xamarin and in Flutter, in order to expose the productivity on each SDK.