For the last few weeks, I have been working on a React Native project for work. So this was my first experience writing “real” mobile apps. Before that, I only wrapped PWA’s as APK and called myself a mobile developer 😎.

React-Native came naturally to me after climbing some learning curves as a React Developer. So, now I wanted to check out the buzz around Flutter.

So last weekend was a fine sunny day which is quite pleasing in the late winter season. It might not be winter from many people’s standard. I opened the Flutter documentation getting started page. The installation file was quite big compared to react-native and it made my expectations high.

At this point, I knew nothing about dart and Flutter, how it works and how to write code. But the Flutter had an excellent write-up comparing React-Native to Dart and Flutter. It helped me directly dive into building things without learning anything. I got pumped up to create something; I thought of a real simple application/game that is just sorting a list of cities so that traversing through all cities in order will be optimal. It’s not a fair game from the graphics standard, 😥 but good enough for me.

The app uses a list of cities downloaded from simplemaps.com and used a geometry formula to calculate the distance. After a day of playing out, I was able to finish it with the help of a lot of google, stack overflow, and 3rd party packages.

It almost feels like magic that I still don’t know dart language correctly, but my app is running. Flutter dev tools are excellent compared to React-Native, which helped me identify and fix issues more quickly.

I published my app just for fun ☺️ on the PlayStore, and if you are interested, you can also check out the code.