Building a Flutter application | Day Zero

utkershrajvenshi — Sat, 07 May 2022 15:22:50 +0000

Introduction

Hi everyone. My name is Utkersh Rajvenshi, a final year student from National Institute of Technology, Uttarakhand majoring in Electrical and Electronics Engineering. I was recently introduced to this hackathon by Appwrite while reading a DEV post for a project I was working on recently.

Project Motivation

I will be making a submission for this hackathon by building an application with Flutter. Recently, I came across an app on Android that lets you create a family room with 4 members and allows you to track their realtime location. I installed that app on my parents' devices but found out that it only supports more than Android 7.0 devices.

Well, I am one of the 1.6% users in the world that still use Android 5.1 on their devices. So, I wanted an app which would support my device. However, my options ran out as not a single one interested me with their bland user interfaces.

Also, none of the applications I came across on Google Play Store were open-source. Since I would be sharing such critical information with the app, I do expect some disclosure of where my data is being hosted or how it's going to be used.

With this in mind, I decided to make an app called FindMyFamily where you could share your location among your family members in real-time. It would have support starting from Android 5.0. I will try to extend the functionality by having more than 4 members in a group and a simplistic yet clean user interface.

Developing with Appwrite

So far, I have looked around in the documentation of Appwrite and I have to say this would really make my life easier for back-end integration. The service being self-hosted means I won't have to worry about high costs if the project gains traction and the user-base increases.

I did have some issues getting it running for the first time on my machine since I am absolutely new to Docker but thankfully the good folks on Appwrite's Discord server made sure that my issues were fixed and I could focus on development.

Short on time

I realise that I am late to the party, so I have to make the most of the 5 days left in the hackathon to come up with a workable solution. Here are some services that I believe my project would require:

Appwrite's Accounts API
Appwrite Storage
Google Maps API
Optimized location tracking(achievable through sensors_plus and geolocator packages in Flutter)

These should be enough for me to make the first iteration of the project. I will be keeping track of my progress by making such posts on DEV.to so in case any other dependencies are required, I'll be sure to mention them in a post.

Off to the races