Riverpod State Management Package in Flutter 3.19

In the dynamic world of mobile app development, efficiency and scalability are paramount, especially when dealing with large-scale applications.

Flutter manages the complexity of mobile app development by providing cross-platform functionality.

The latest version of Flutter, 3.19, brings new features to make the development experience easier and more user-friendly. One of the best features that Flutter provides is State Management.

State Management

State management in Flutter acts as an app memory that stores crucial information like login status, user preferences, and more. It allows you to centrally manage this data and ensure it flows seamlessly throughout your app.

This is what empowers your app to adapt to user interactions and deliver a consistently delightful user experience. Flutter offers various state management packages to handle the state of your widgets. Let's explore the Riverpod State Management package for Flutter 3.19.

Riverpod State Management Package

A relatively new library inspired by Provider, Riverpod offers a simplified approach with a single source of truth for state management. It utilizes Providers to manage state and avoids boilerplate code with features like automatic provider scoping and change detection.

Advantages of Riverpod State Management Library

• Easy to learn and use, with a clean and concise API.
• Improves code organization and reduces boilerplate compared to Provider.
• Automatic change detection ensures efficient UI updates.
• Well-suited for both small and large applications.

Disadvantages of Riverpod State Management Library

• Under development state with a smaller community compared to Provider.
• Lack of some features available in other solutions.

How Riverpod Library Works

Let’s discuss the working process of Riverpod with an example:

Step 1. Define network requests by writing a function annotated with @riverpod:

@riverpod
Future<String> movieSuggestion(MovieSuggestionRef ref) async {
  final response = await http.get(
      Uri.https('https://xyz.com/api/movie'),
  );
  final json = jsonDecode(response.body);
  return json['activity']! as String;
}

Step 2. Listen to the network request in your UI and gracefully handle loading/error states.

class Home extends ConsumerWidget {
   @override
   Widget build(BuildContext context, WidgetRef ref) {
      final movieSuggestion = ref.watch(MovieSuggestionProvider);
      return movieSuggestion.when(
         loading: () => Text('loading'),
         error: (error, stackTrace) => Text('error: $error'),
         data: (data) => Text(data),
      );
   }
}