Mobile App Relaunch Ahead

More than a decade ago I followed examples from a Wrox book and created my first Android program on Android Froyo and Gingerbread. Then later on I published several apps on Google Play. I had several hundred downloads! Nope they are no longer there. These old apps no longer work because you will be greeted by message saying it is too old to run on your modern phone. The dot-dot-dot menu is gone so screens (activities) won't be able to launch.

The apps on Developer Console needs constant attention. Need to declare status, ratings, etc, or require more graphics etc. Don't want to bother? Boom removed by google. That's perfectly fine. They were just my experimental apps.

After some time I simply give up updating them. I don't have many new ideas for apps anyway.

They were written in Java, on Eclipse, using the Android SDK. It was fairly straightforward. You get a little form designer, add some widgets and get a constant for each widget.. and you can hook up listeners to react to button clicks etc.

Fast forward 10 years. Android SDK programming still remain mostly the same. But nowadays just about everybody despise Java and Eclipse and fall in love with Kotlin and IntelliJ. In fact, the Android Studio is based off of IntelliJ.

But the problem is still this: more than half people use iPhone. How can your awesome Android apps run on them?

Of course, you can ditch Android SDK and go with HTML/javascript. There are at least several options for that: Cordova, Ionic. Or you can even go C# with Xamarin, or go with React Native (and gosh I hate React).. and gosh, so many options. (just google "cross platform framework").

But I want to try something from the giant google... and that is Flutter. Its Gallery seems dazzling and seems like plenty of resources. to learn from.

I decided to make my apps shine again, modernized AND running on iphones. More on Flutter later. Basically you can toss your HTML/CSS out the window.