Your First Flutter App: An App From Scratch

Hey everyone, my name is Brian and welcome to the first course on learning Flutter development that assumes you have no development experience whatsoever. I will walk you through the process of creating and distributing an app with Flutter.

In this course, you’ll learn how to create your very first Flutter app.

This is a simple but fun game called Bull’s Eye where users are tasked with guessing the correct number on a slider. This course is meant for folks at all levels of programming experience: it’s good for experienced developers, new to Flutter, and it’s good for people who’ve never programmed at all.

This course is quite intentionally based off of our course “Your First iOS and SwiftUI App” course for iOS Developers. Bullseye is the app created in that course too, and so in this course, you get to see how to make the same exact app… just using the Flutter framework instead of the iOS SDK and Swift.

If you’ve watched that course before watching this one, you’ll get to compare and contrast Flutter development against native iOS development. Our hope is that this will help you understand both Flutter and iOS on an even deeper level, and also see that Flutter development isn’t all that different from native development.

And the best part is your app will run exactly the same on Android devices! You can even take Flutter apps to the web and desktop. Flutter really is becoming the best of many worlds!

In the next episode, we’ll begin by discussing what Flutter is, and how it differs from native iOS and Android development. You’ll learn the answer to burning questions you might have - “Should I learn Flutter? Or should I learn native iOS and Android?”

In the third episode, we’ll take a look at the steps you need to run through to get started with Flutter development. That includes installing the Flutter tools, choosing an editor, and installing the iOS and Android software development kits.

Then, I’ll walk you through the process of installing a Flutter development environment on both macOS and Windows. Choose the episode that works for your platform.

Then, we’ll create a brand new project in Visual Studio Code so we can build the entire app from scratch. You’ll learn about all the various components that make up a Flutter project.

Then we’ll close out this part by creating a simple user interface and then previewing your new interface on an Android emulator.

This course is designed to be hands-on, where we’ll build the app together step-by-step. It’s very important that you don’t just watch the exercises, but actually follow along. Open up Visual Studio Code, type along with me, and run the app we build in the either iOS Simulator or an Android emulator. This helps you understand how the app gets built step by step.

In addition, the course contains several hands-on challenges, where you’ll get to practice what you’ve just learned on your own. It’s in your best interest to actually pause the video and try solving the challenges - you’ll learn a ton by doing this. There is a big difference between knowing the path and walking the path… And the only way to learn programming is to actually do it.

It is my sincere belief that this course, and those to follow in our Flutter Beginners learning path, can turn you from a complete newbie into an accomplished Flutter developer, but you do have to put in the time and effort. By making this course, we’ve done our part. The rest is up to you!

OK - so let’s blast off into our Flutter adventure by taking a look at what exactly Flutter is.