Applying Cross-Platform Techniques
Explore cross-platform techniques in Flutter to build consistent and efficient web and mobile apps. Learn about Flutter's rendering engines for web, how to configure the web folder and index.html, and customize app icons for different platforms. Understand the Android build setup and how to modify gradle settings and generate platform-specific icons.
Icons and rendering
The Flutter engine ensures that the UI looks and behaves consistently across different platforms. This is achieved through Flutter’s use of its own rendering engine, which allows Flutter apps to maintain a unified appearance and behavior, regardless of whether they’re running on Android, iOS, web browsers, or desktop platforms. Although it runs quite well with default settings, we need to do some edits of our own to optimize it.
The web folder
The web folder in a Flutter project is used for web-specific resources and configurations. It’s meant for targeting and building the Flutter app to run on web browsers. We can include web-specific HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files in this folder.
When it comes to rendering Flutter apps for the web, there are two primary rendering engines:
HTML/CSS renderer
CanvasKit renderer
Let’s discuss the differences between these two renderers.
HTML/CSS Renderer
The HTML/CSS Renderer is the default rendering engine used when we build and deploy a Flutter app for the web. It leverages existing web technologies—like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript—to render the Flutter UI. Here are some key points about this renderer: ...