Setting Up Flutter On Mac OS X

I tried Flutter about a year ago (I like to try everything out there) and I recall it being super easy. I thought I’d try it again. Here’s the sequence I followed.

Install all the pieces of your Flutter dev environment

Go here and follow all the instructions. It took me 1.5 hour to get everything configured the way that ‘flutter -v doctor’ told me to do so. Nothing broke along the way. Really!

I was skeptical when I had to do things like this:

But in the end I made it … that was a relief. Stuff like this made me a little nervous like it always does …

🍺  /usr/local/Cellar/libimobiledevice/HEAD-2332655_3: 67 files, 1MB, built in 40 seconds
==> Caveats

Even though the doctor said everything was okay …

Run the iOS version of the base Flutter app

So then you follow the instructions on the same install page with:

$ flutter create my_app
$ cd my_app
$ flutter run

And then it actually … works (at least in my case):

Getting it to work on a real device requires using your Xcode setup plus a valid APDA membership (which I’m always lapsing but maybe in this case I’ll re-up once again …). It took me 10 minutes to get their iOS demo running, and I figure I might lose 30+ minutes going the full XCode route — so I’ll save that one for later.

Run the Android version of the base Flutter app

I was impressed because when I figured out how to attach to the different simulator devices with:

$ flutter devices

And then you can pick the device you want to deploy to (be sure to enclose the name in quotation marks) and … it runs!

This only took me 10 more minutes on top of the previous iOS simulator run. Okay. I think I might be hooked. —JM