Game dev isn't my day job. I build enterprise software by day, and indie games at night. Recently, I wanted to add a 20-player live race mode to my Flutter/Flame auto-runner, Trinity Rush.

The problem? I didn't want to burn hundreds of dollars a month running authoritative game servers. If my wife saw an AWS bill for a hobby project, I'd be sleeping on the couch.

So I faked real-time multiplayer using deterministic seeds and tiny input logs over Firebase Realtime Database.

1. Zero server-side physics

Trinity Rush is a one-thumb party runner (your 3-hero party is your health bar; tap to jump, tap in mid-air for class skills). Because the physics are deterministic, I don't need a server calculating collisions. When a host starts a lobby (up to 20 players), they generate a single random course seed and a synchronized start timestamp (countdownLead = 3500ms). Every phone generates the exact same obstacle course locally.

1. Streaming 12-byte tap events instead of X/Y coordinates

Streaming 60fps position vectors for 20 players would melt the Firebase free tier. Instead, I only record press/release timestamps in simulation milliseconds:

`{'t': tMs, 'k': press ? 1 : 0}`

Every 250ms, the client flushes that tiny batch to Firebase RTDB (with local disk persistence disabled so it stays pure in-memory).

1. The 1.75-second Spectator and Public Broadcast illusion

When your party wipes, you drop into Spectator Mode to watch the survivors (and if the host toggles Public Broadcast in the lobby, anyone hanging out in the Tavern can tune in live). To keep network jitter from making other players teleport around, the spectator engine runs on a 1.75s delay buffer. Your phone reads the surviving players' tap logs and replays their exact inputs locally against the shared map seed.

It looks and feels like a chaotic 20-player live race (complete with live skull and confetti emotes), but under the hood it's just phones passing a few kilobytes of JSON back and forth. Total server cost for 1,000 active matches? $0.

If you want to test the netcode (or try to break it), the game is free on iOS and Android:

https://wono.dev/trinity-rush/get

Happy to answer any questions about how Flame handles deterministic fixed-timestep loops or how I structured the Firebase RTDB listeners!

Hey all! I’ve been using shared_preferences in my apps for ages. Recently I went down a rabbit hole and found out about iCloud key-value storage and Android’s backup manager, which are basically a tiny dictionary in the cloud: you save a value under a key (like theme = dark), and the OS keeps it synced or backed up for you. It’s not meant for big files, just small stuff like settings, flags and progress.

iCloud and Google both have different sizes, iCloudKVS offers 1 MB per app, max 1024 keys. Android Auto Backup offers up to 25 MB per app, and it doesn’t count against the user’s Google Drive storage. I’d recommend staying under iCloud’s 1 MB limit so it works on both platforms, but you are not forced to do so.

So I built flutter_cloud_preferences. It works pretty much like shared_preferences (same kind of API, sync reads), but it also stores a copy of your data in the cloud for reinstalls or installation on new devices.

Quick rundown of what happens under the hood:

iOS/macOS: everything you save also goes to iCloud key-value storage. After a fresh install, it pulls the data back in the background, so there’s no waiting at startup. There’s an onRestored stream if you want to know when it is restored. You can also turn on live sync between devices if you want it (off by default as Android does not support this).

Android: this one hooks into Android’s built-in Auto Backup. Your users do need Google backup turned on (Settings > Google > Backup), but it’s on by default on most phones. Android backs up the data by itself about once a day when the phone is idle, charging and on Wi-Fi. When someone reinstalls or sets up a new phone, the data’s already there before the app even opens. No Drive setup, no extra code.

Your local data is always your main source of data, so if someone has no iCloud or backup turned off, it just works like normal shared_preferences. There is also a migration guide available.

It supports strings, bools, ints, doubles, string lists and bytes.

pub.dev: https://pub.dev/packages/flutter_cloud_preferences
GitHub: https://github.com/nvanderwaal/flutter_cloud_preferences

It’s still 0.1.0, so I’d love feedback, issues or PRs. Please let me know your thoughts!

Hi
A security vulnerability affects Dart and Flutter applications that establish TLS/HTTPS connections on Android, Windows, and certain Linux environments. Compromised eMudhra intermediate certificate authorities could allow an attacker intercepting network traffic to generate fake certificates for legitimate domains.
Versions earlier than Dart 3.13.7 and Flutter 3.47.8 are affected, including certain beta versions.
Web, iOS, and macOS applications are not affected according to the published advisory. It is recommended to update the SDK, recompile the applications, and redeploy the affected binaries.
the full security advisory

If you've ever needed a valid ID token for one of your Flutter app's users just to curl your backend or a Cloud Function, this is for you.

Firebase Token Toolkit loads your service-account key, lists your project's users, and gives you a real ID token for any of them in one click, with the decoded claims underneath and a copy button next to it. It works for every user whatever their sign-in method (email, Google, Apple, phone, anonymous), and the token passes verifyIdToken on your server.

The parts that matter for Flutter projects:

• Android and iOS apps: "Load apps" imports the apps from your flutterfire configure project. If your API keys are restricted to the Android or iOS app, it sends the package/SHA-1 or bundle-ID headers Google checks for, so those keys work too
• Custom claims: load, edit and save a user's claims as JSON, handy for testing role-based UI and security rules
• App Check: exchange a registered debug token for an App Check token to call protected endpoints from Postman or curl
• Profiles for dev/staging/prod Firebase projects

Linux, Windows and macOS. MIT licensed, no telemetry.

GitHub: https://github.com/smaranjit/firebase-token-toolkit

Please use it with a dev project, since a service-account key can sign in as any user. Feedback and issues welcome.

Ran into this in a Flutter app I work on, sharing in case it saves someone a confusing bug report.

We generate a PDF report with the pdf and printing packages and used PdfGoogleFonts.interRegular() to get proper Unicode. Looking at printing's source (5.14.3, lib/src/fonts/font.dart), the call first looks for an asset called google_fonts/Inter-Regular.ttf. If it isn't there, it downloads the font from fonts.gstatic.com into PdfMemoryCache, which is memory only, so the first export after every cold start needs the network.

The part that got us: if that download fails, it returns Font.helvetica(). The error is only printed inside an assert, so a release build says nothing. Helvetica has no Unicode coverage, so Arabic, Cyrillic, CJK and plenty of symbols come out broken. Someone exporting on a plane gets a different-looking PDF with missing characters, and you never see an error.

The fix was small. We bundled the TTF under the exact name the package looks for:

yaml flutter: assets: - google_fonts/Inter-Regular.ttf - google_fonts/Inter-Bold.ttf

The expected names and the exact download URLs are in printing's lib/src/fonts/gfonts.dart, so you can grab the same file and keep its name. We also added a test that swaps the font cache for one that throws on any download, so it fails unless the font comes from the bundle. Inter is under the OFL, so we ship the licence too.

Quick check for your own app: release build, airplane mode, cold start, export.

Do you bundle fonts for your PDFs, or rely on the download? And if you generate PDFs with Arabic or CJK text, do you use fontFallback or one font that covers everything?

Hey everyone!

I've just published report_flutter, an open-source Flutter package for creating reports and labels using a visual designer, without having to build every layout entirely in code.

The goal is to provide Flutter developers with a flexible reporting solution inspired by traditional report designers like Crystal Reports, but integrated directly into the Flutter ecosystem.

It's designed for desktop and mobile applications, allowing developers to integrate report creation and viewing directly into their apps.

Key features

• Visual report designer: create and customize layouts using a drag-and-drop editor.
• No-code charts: add charts to your reports directly through the visual designer.
• Reusable templates: create, save, duplicate, organize, and reuse report templates.
• Dynamic data: integrate data from your application into your reports.
• Tables and formulas: build structured reports with tabular data and calculations.
• Barcodes and QR codes: useful for product labels, inventory management, and business documents.
• PDF generation and printing: generate PDFs and configure custom paper sizes, including A4, A5, A6, and label formats.
• Built-in report viewer: preview reports with pagination, zoom, and navigation.
• Import and export: import CSV and JSON, and export to PDF, CSV, and Excel.
• Customizable layouts: use images, shapes, Markdown, and other elements to build reports that fit your needs.

The project has just been released, and I'd love to hear feedback from the Flutter community.

What features do you consider essential in a Flutter report designer? What would you add to make it even more complete?

Thanks for checking it out!

pub.dev: https://pub.dev/packages/report_flutter

github: github.com/Vincenzoferrara/report_flutter

wanted people to be able to try my flutter app without signing up. First idea was one shared demo account but then everyone sees everyone elses chats, not great lol

turns out supabase has anonymous sign in. You turn it on in the auth settings and then it's literally just

await Supabase.instance.client.auth.signInAnonymously();

every visitor gets their own real user with its own id. So all my existing rls policies just work, every guest only sees their own stuff. Didn't have to change anything in the db

one thing good to know: anon users get the normal authenticated role. So if you have stuff that only real accounts should do, you gotta check the is_anonymous claim in the jwt, otherwise guests can do it too

also put a daily limit per user on the AI calls since guests cost me money and theres no email behind them

I'm keeping the guest accounts for now, kinda nice to see how many ppl actually tried it. Does anyone convert them to real accounts later (linking an email to the anon user) or do you just let people start fresh when they sign up?

I wrote an article (without AI) about how to create a PDF document in Dart. Mainly because I wanted to share the fact that this isn't as hart as you might think – at least if you don't want to display text.

This is part 1 of 2. Part 2 is about using the Courier font. Supporting all TrueType fonts might be more practical, but parsing TTF files to acces the glyph measurements takes more code than everything I wrote so far and then you want to rewrite the TTF to support subsetting.

Hey Flutter developers! 👋

Have you ever needed to investigate a bug on a physical device without connecting a debugger or asking someone to reproduce it on your development machine?

That’s one of the problems I wanted to solve with debug_bubble — a lightweight Flutter package that adds a draggable floating debug bubble and an in-app dashboard for inspecting logs and errors.

🔗 pub.dev: https://pub.dev/packages/debug_bubble

🛠️ What can it do?

• 🎈 Floating debug bubble — open the diagnostic dashboard directly inside your app.
• 📋 Structured logging — seven severity levels, from trace to critical.
• 🔍 Log inspection — inspect metadata, JSON payloads, errors, and stack traces.
• 🚨 Uncaught error capture — opt-in hooks for Flutter and platform-dispatched errors.
• 🔐 Sensitive-data redaction — configurable rules to mask sensitive values before they appear in logs.
• 📤 Export tools — copy filtered logs or export structured JSON.
• 🪶 No third-party runtime dependencies — built using Flutter and Dart.

⚡ Getting started

Initialize the logger:

void main() {
  WidgetsFlutterBinding.ensureInitialized();

  DebugLog.init(
    const DebugBubbleConfig(
      captureUncaughtErrors: true,
    ),
  );

  runApp(const MyApp());
}

Wrap your app using the MaterialApp builder:

MaterialApp(
  builder: (context, child) => DebugBubble(
    child: child ?? const SizedBox.shrink(),
  ),
  home: const HomeScreen(),
);

Log events wherever you need them:

DebugLog.info(
  'User opened settings',
  tag: 'Navigation',
);

DebugLog.success(
  'Profile synced',
  tag: 'Sync',
  json: responseData,
);

DebugLog.error(
  'Request failed',
  tag: 'Network',
  error: error,
  stackTrace: stackTrace,
);

🎯 Design goals

I wanted to keep the package lightweight, avoid extra runtime dependencies, provide bounded log storage, and make diagnostics accessible without leaving the running app.

The package is designed to be inert in Flutter release mode, so the debugging overlay and logging pipeline don't run as they do in debug builds.

I'd love your feedback!

I'm especially interested in feedback on:

• The dashboard UX and log-inspection workflow
• Missing features that would actually help during QA and debugging
• API design and what you'd expect from a Flutter debugging toolkit
• Potential edge cases I've overlooked

This is an actively developed project, and constructive criticism is very welcome.

Thanks for checking it out! 🚀

Switching to other languages in order to write backend applications because there's a clear lack availability of the tools around that in dart ecosystem.

One such problem I kept hitting: there is no standard package like (swag for go) to generate OpenAPI specs and Swagger UI for Dart backends. Thinking about solving this problem I started working on Axle(v0.3 out now).

The core idea is small. Almost everything lives in one package, axle_core: the annotations, the OpenAPI 3.1 document model, and a tiny serving contract called AxleDocs. No framework imports, no runtime dependencies. A CLI reads your annotated Dart source with package:analyzer and emits the spec, so no build_runner and no runtime registry. Then thin adapters translate AxleDocs into framework responses. I published adapters for Serverpod 4, Shelf, and Relic, but they are intentionally boring on purpose, anyone can write one for another framework without touching core or the CLI.

It gives you openapi.json, openapi.yaml, Swagger UI assets, and an AOT-safe const string. It handles security schemes, response headers, cookies, multiple media types, multipart uploads, parameter constraints, and oneOf schemas. If a route references a security scheme that doesn't exist, generation fails instead of emitting a broken contract.

Docs are at https://axle.infms.dev if you want the full picture. There is also an agent skill that walks through setup end to end:

npx skills add infm5/axle --skill axle-openapi-setup

If you've felt the same backend-in-Dart pain, I'd genuinely like to hear what would make this useful to you. Advice, criticism, all welcome.

I want to implement this dialog prompt but it is very bad UX as it freezes the app (at least when I test it) for about 5 seconds. I prefer not using it if it does not work in a good way. I am considering having my own dialog + redirect to the App Store. Is this a bad direction? Anyeone here having experinece with this?

I'm curious how experienced Flutter developers would approach a business application with:

• Complex order entry forms
• Product specifications and configurable options
• Multi-level Bill of Materials (BOM)
• BOM calculations and material requirements

How long would you estimate for one developer to build this from scratch, including the business logic and UI?

What would be the most challenging part?

I love Flutter Firebase UI for shipping fast, but if your app doesn't use Material or Cupertino, the auth screens look completely out of place. As a solo dev trying to move fast, writing custom auth flows from scratch is the last thing I want to do.

Lately, I’ve been migrating my apps to Forui to step away from the default look and build something more branded. But the upstream Firebase UI packages were a huge pain point. My auth screens were still stuck looking like Material, even on iOS.

To fix this, I spent the weekend (with the help of Cursor) forking and porting Firebase UI for Flutter over to Forui.

It uses the exact same Firebase UI APIs and behaviors, but the widgets are themed entirely through FTheme instead of the dual Material/Cupertino paths. (Check the attached screenshots taken on iOS and the difference is immediate).

Highlights:

• Same APIs, but natively uses Forui components for a coherent UI end-to-end.
• Fixed some long-standing upstream bugs and the E2E tests along the way.
• Drop-in replacement: If you already use the original Firebase UI, you can migrate your existing repo with a single command (check the docs).

It’s still early (v0.1.0), but if you're building with Forui or just fighting the Material/Cupertino mismatch, give it a try. Repo: https://github.com/gnomezgrave/forui_FirebaseUI-Flutter

Packages on pub.dev: https://pub.dev/publishers/hexmatter.com/packages

• forui_firebase_ui_auth
• forui_firebase_ui_database
• forui_firebase_ui_firestore
• forui_firebase_ui_localizations
• forui_firebase_ui_oauth
• forui_firebase_ui_oauth_apple
• forui_firebase_ui_oauth_facebook
• forui_firebase_ui_oauth_google
• forui_firebase_ui_oauth_twitter
• forui_firebase_ui_shared
• forui_firebase_ui_storage

Feedback, issues, and GitHub stars are super appreciated! 🙏

I shipped an Orthodox Christian fasting app in Flutter. Its whole job is to say what someone may eat on a given day, so a wrong answer is worse than a crash. A few things that worked:

1. Keep the rules in pure Dart. The rule engine lives in lib/core/ with no Flutter imports, so it is tested like any Dart library. It's a port of orthocal-python (MIT), with attribution.

2. Test against an external source, and compare data, not prose. A test checks every day from 2020 to 2033 against orthocal.info. It used to map their English descriptions back to my levels, so a wrong engine and a wrong mapping agreed with each other. Comparing their explicit list of foods instead, and adding the Old Calendar, surfaced 58 mismatching days from four real rule errors. All 10,228 day-comparisons match now.

3. Never do date math with Duration(days: 1). A user saw the calendar show November 1 twice: adding 24 hours across a daylight-saving change lands on the same date. A test now fails if Duration(days:) or .inDays appears anywhere in lib/ or tool/.

4. Local-first means no backend to fix things later. No server, no account, no analytics. The price comes from the store at runtime (a test fails if a price is hard-coded in any of the six ARB files), so regional pricing could not leave a wrong number on a button.

5. Watch your transitive dependencies in release builds. An unused package pulled in WorkManager, and R8 crashed its database init only in the release build, only on a real device.

Happy to go deeper on any of these. App, for context: https://stforge.dev/nisteia

I've been building Vishram, a movie and TV discovery app, solo in Flutter. The old home screen was a dead grid nobody interacted with, so I replaced it with a swipe stack on trending titles, with toggles for local vs world trending and movie vs TV.

A few things from the rebuild:

- When friends tested it, it only worked on my phone

- The bento grid uses cutout art so characters pop out of their tiles, which makes layout bounds and visual bounds different per tile

- Watched, Watching and Watchlist now sync to the cloud

The auth layer (multi-role, Supabase based) is free and open source if it saves anyone time:

GitHub: https://github.com/ba6ul/multi-role-flutter-auth

pub.dev: https://pub.dev/packages/multi_role_auth

Full devlog if you want the whole build: https://youtu.be/wXsyyEh9ook

Happy to answer questions about the swipe stack or the auth setup.

For the past few months I’ve been building a Rummy card game in my spare time. It’s nearly ready, and I’d love some outside eyes on it before launch.

What it does:
- Play against a computer opponent anytime, or online with friends and family
- Built with Flutter, so one codebase for Android and iOS

What I’d love feedback on:
- What would make you keep coming back to a card game?
- Any features you’d expect that most Rummy apps get wrong?

I’ve set up a waitlist for early testers if anyone wants to try it: https://flutter-rummy.web.app/

is there any library or method you would recommend?

Since my last post, Flutterverse now tracks 10k+ projects: pub.dev’s top 5,000 packages plus public Flutter/Dart GitHub repos with 50+ stars. Stats refresh daily.

Discover rising packages by momentum, not just popularity.

The searchable Hall of Fame now features 34 developers and 29 projects.

Website: https://flutterverse.org
Github: https://github.com/YeLwinOo-Steve/flutterverse

Missing a package or know someone who deserves a spot? Hit Propose on the site!

Soon. https://github.com/dart-lang/core/pull/1030

This is Dartpad Web!

Runs #Dart compiler, analyzer, LSP and compiles and runs your code in your browser directly. No server needed! Works offline too!

You can use any pure Dart package from pub.dev too that compiles to web.

Any Efforts to make Flutter Agentic friendly ?, by google in recent times.

With agentic apps taking off, how are you approaching on-device LLMs across platforms (iOS, Android, desktop)?

Are you using things like llama.cpp via FFI, plugins like flutter_gemma, or running everything server-side? What are your biggest hurdles with performance and memory?

Hey guys, we've been building Flutter-native solutions for Pharma, Manufacturing and regulated industries for the past one and a half years. And in the process we have developed a controlled Document Editor entirely native in Flutter that can be used to build rich text editors from a single line all the way to a complex word processor (with support for 85% of the features in Docx OOXML standard). You can import and export docx files, including PDFs and markdowns.

This has been a long journey for the past 8 months or so, not your typical weekend-vibe-coded document editor. It has been tested across a wide range of scenarios, especially around performance, features, and editing with a combination of different blocks and elements and properties and so on. We are finally in the state where we're releasing it for public beta usage.

I have been building software for the past 25 years, including a wide range of designers, toolkits, framework including a tiny framework called MobX. And a lot of that experience has been poured into building this document editor, especially focused on high performance editing.

Feel free to test it out, try out the examples, and if you're interested, let's talk about integrating it into your own apps.

https://document.vyuh.tech

t's called Draft. You drag Flutter widgets onto a canvas to put a screen together, tap through it in a preview that behaves like a real app, and copy the code when you're happy with it.

Right now it has 47 widgets, 36 ready-made sections, 16 starter templates and 8 style packs. You can see a screen at phone, tablet and desktop sizes, and the code comes out as Flutter, or as React with Tailwind. It can also write a description of your screen that you can hand to an AI.

It does not write your app's logic. It's for the screens: the part where you're moving things around and trying things out.

It's a beta, so expect rough edges. Windows only for now, and a few things will break. That's the reason I'm posting: I want to hear what's confusing, what's missing and what annoys you, and I read everything.

The editor is free. Download: https://draftapp.dev/en
Come say hi on Discord: https://discord.gg/hYnaxBMS2