Google's new Flutter cross-platform development platform[1] is intended to build code that runs on iOS and Android. Perhaps best thought of as a competitor to Microsoft's Xamarin, it uses Google's Dart language, with a C++ runtime and a set of user interface widgets for iOS and for Android, based on each target mobile platform's look-and-feel.
A public beta has recently been released, and Google is already using Flutter internally for some of its own applications. That's a good sign, so I decided to take a look at how Google expects developers to build and test their Flutter applications.
Flutter development; code running on a test OnePlus 5T
One of the selling points for Flutter is speed of development and testing, building on familiar development tooling and on direct connections to test devices. The set up process is a little complex, and you're going to need to delve into your development system settings to get everything working. That's to be expected for beta code, and I'd expect the final release to have a more sophisticated set up process. Things are changing fast too, so with regular updates for Flutter and its tooling, be prepared for regular downloads.
I set up my Flutter dev tooling on my usual laptop. It's a Core i7 Surface Book, so there's plenty of headroom for development tooling. Installation does need some work; you'll need to have an up-to-date PowerShell install and have Git for Windows, as you'll need to clone the Flutter GitHub repository[2] to get access to libraries and sample code as part of the install.
See: How to build a successful developer career (free PDF)[3]
The Flutter SDK is the first part of the install; once down and unzipped where you