Do flutter support android TV app development

[Bharath Antony]

I wanted to build an app using flutter . Do flutter support android TV app development ?

[Stefan Matthias Aust]

You probably can create an android TV app using Flutter but chances are still high that you cannot correctly interact with the app.

It will not work out of the box.

There is no official support for the DPAD in Flutter. You can hook up Shortcut actions for most of the actions yourself. I managed to make the Drawer work, for example. Because Flutter's support for desktop the Focus handling has improved, but it is still not great. Prepare to do some rather low-level stuff yourself. Automatic highlighting of widgets has been added to the InkResponder but if that automatism doesn't work for you, you will end up recreating basic widgets like buttons yourself. And as far as I know there is still no support for scrolling lists with the keyboard and therefore you will probably not be able to scroll lists with the DPAD. If you are willing to create your own implementation of a List widget, you should be fine here.

However, last time I checked (~6 months ago) the focus handling for TextFields was still broken. This is an engine thing and you cannot create a workaround in Flutter. (At least I failed and gave up.) My app got stuck once I entered a text field twice or had more than one text field on the screen. And TextField callbacks didn't behave as expected. Furthermore, the TextField did behave quite differently to a native one.

Therefore, if you just need to display stuff and have minimal user interaction, it should be possible. If you need the user to enter information, don't use Futter yet.

Furthermore, as there is no support for Apple TV for a foreseeable future, don't expect to create cross platform solutions.

Stefan

On Sun, Aug 2, 2020 at 12:08 PM Bharath Antony <sbharat...@gmail.com> wrote:

I wanted to build an app using flutter . Do flutter support android TV app development ?

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