Hello, FlutterFlow Community!
My partner Pedro Mamare and I are excited to share our incredible journey with you! At the end of last year, we decided to move from native development with Swift to FlutterFlow. Initially, our biggest concern was the dependency on tools like FlutterFlow and how that might limit our options. However, after seeing the continuous updates, week after week, we decided to put all our chips on FlutterFlow. And I can confidently say that it was one of the best decisions we’ve made!
In this post, I want to highlight some things that have had a significant impact on our team and share a few suggestions we think could enhance the platform even more. Unfortunately, we haven’t been part of the beta program yet, but we use FlutterFlow daily and have some ideas to help improve this amazing tool!
FlutterFlow’s evolution from January to now has been absolutely impressive. It has transformed from being "just" an app builder to, in my opinion, a mega framework/ecosystem for low-code/no-code development. Today, FlutterFlow is a reference for how a low-code builder should be. Below is a brief review of some features that have truly impacted our day-to-day work:
### What impressed us the most:
- Continuous Updates: Companies with much larger teams haven't achieved what FlutterFlow has accomplished in just one year!
- Libraries: The libraries system has been an incredible addition. Recently, we saw that they are working on hooks, and even though many people were frustrated with the deprecation of “team code,” it’s a necessary process for the platform's progress. For example, when we needed to pass keys, the team was already working on it, and they released LibraryValues! This shows how much we can trust the FlutterFlow team — they are always focusing on what truly matters.
The libraries system will allow the FlutterFlow team to focus on what's important for the platform instead of solving third-party integration issues. Take RevenueCat, for example, which was using a version that was one year old. With this new possibility, partners like RevenueCat can now keep their libraries up to date directly!
- Native Testing on iOS/Android: Testing native functionality used to be a huge challenge, especially when we relied on paywalls and integrations that didn't work in the browser. Now, with native testing, we save so much time and effort.
- VSCode Extension: Simply phenomenal! The productivity boost this brings is incredible, unleashing insane power for companies wanting to build advanced apps like ours. We initially migrated just 3 apps to FlutterFlow, but now we’re committed to moving all our apps to the platform.
### Other notable improvements:
- Actions and triggers
- Renaming data types
- Passing datatype as a parameter to pages and components
- Parallel actions
- Enums
- JSON to datatype
- Redesign of the color picker
- Dev environment
- API evolution
- Custom Auth
- Debug tests
- Descriptions for pages and components
### My suggestions for even more improvement:
1. Libraries: It would be amazing if you could add a "Libraries" tab in the main menu to keep things organized. Without this, the interface could become cluttered with so many functions being turned into libraries.
2. Custom Actions: A suggestion I've already sent is the ability to organize custom actions into folders, with colors and subfolders. This would make navigation much more intuitive in larger projects where actions can pile up and cause confusion.
Finally, we want to thank the incredible FlutterFlow team. In just one year, you have evolved so much that it’s hard to describe it all here. The year started with many uncertainties, and now, looking back, we see how right we were to trust in you.
Thank you for everything, FlutterFlow! 💙
Disclaimer: We are native Portuguese speakers, so we apologize for any errors in this post. Thank you for your understanding!
