How to Install Flutter App on Android?

The hottest and trending cross-platform framework, Flutter is Google's SDK for crafting beautiful, fast user experiences for mobile, web, and desktop with just a single codebase, meaning you write for one, build for three. Flutter works with existing code, is used by developers and organizations around the world, and is free and open source.

The helps us create beautiful, fast apps, with a productive, extensible, and open development model. It has sort of a layered architecture that enables us to “control every pixel of our screen” and its powerful compositing capabilities can enable us to overlay and animate graphics, video, text, and controls without limitation. Flutter includes a full set of widgets that deliver pixel-perfect experiences on both iOS and Android. And yes, if you have experienced Flutter, you would know its just widgets, widgets, and widgets! They even give us out-of-the-box Material widgets for easy designing, and its UI just looks beautiful, even without you trying! I love how the Flutter framework provides us with a modern, minimalistic UI and fluid animations that are just difficult to obtain with native development.

The performance is just mind-blowing —  It's powered by the same hardware-accelerated 2D graphics library that underpins Chrome and Android: Skia. We architected Flutter to support glitch-free, wind-free graphics at the native speed of your device. Flutter code is powered by the world-class Dart platform, which enables compilation to 32-bit and 64-bit ARM machine code for iOS and Android, as well as JavaScript for the web and Intel x64 for desktop devices.

Now, I guess you have a basic idea of what Flutter is. But, let's get to the real question — how do I power my Flutter apps on my Android device?

Run and install your app on an Android device:

Setting up Android Studio:

Though Flutter code can be written on various code editors, we prefer to run it on Android Studio, giving you the complete Flutter experience. It is because Flutter relies on a full installation of Android Studio to supply its Android platform dependencies. 

1. Install Android Studio

2. Download and install Android Studio.

3. Start Android Studio, and go through the ‘Android Studio Setup Wizard’. This installs the latest Android SDK, Android SDK Platform-Tools, and Android SDK Build-Tools, which are required by Flutter when developing for Android.

Build your app on an Android device:

To prepare to run and test your Flutter app on an Android device, you’ll need an Android device running Android 4.1 (API level 16) or higher.

Get your Android device ready and follow the steps:

• Enable Developer Options and USB debugging on your device.

• Open the Settings app.
• Search for 'About phone' and select it.
• Find and tap Build number( for MI, it is MIUI version) 7 times.
• Return to the previous screen to find Developer options near the bottom.
• Scroll down and enable USB debugging.

• Using a USB cable, plug your phone into your computer. If prompted on your device, authorize your computer to access your device.
• In the terminal, run the flutter devices command to verify that Flutter recognizes your connected Android device.

• All right, now all you need to do is to run flutter run to run it on the android device.

Now, you could run the Flutter app on a simulator as well. But in case you have a low-spec machine, I would suggest you to go for testing your app with a physical device. Also, testing on physical devices gives you the most accurate test results because you are testing on the actual device on which your software will run. Physical devices can also eliminate the chances of erratic test results due to unforeseen differences between a real software environment and an emulated one. Due to this reason, testing on physical devices is a good idea when you need test results to be as accurate as possible.

Well, thanks for reading this article, and I am sure you have got an idea of how to run and install your Flutter app on an Android device. 

References:

• Read the Flutter Documentation
• Flutter YouTube Channel