I am proud to say that I was able to build my first flutter app in 4 days more or less ready for production.
Before these days I hadn’t any experience about flutter. But I always like the idea to easily build apps for personal use. After some failed attempts to build some useful personal apps over the last two years using python i heard about flutter. So this month I had some free time and set me the challenge to learn flutter, build an android app and publish it to google play store IN 4 DAYS.
The app I’ve chosen is some kind of pacing calculator I can use for running and triathlon training. For this purpose I used a google doc so far. In only need a few simple string and math operations on a few pages, no backend required. This seems to be perfect for my first app, not to complex and I would use to optimize my training in the future.
The development process actually starts one day to early. With my plan I could not wait to start and build a coffee card app in the evening of day 0 using the Flutter Crash Course of Net Ninja on Youtube. With the learnings I get from this tutorial I start at the morning of day 1 with my own flutter app called Goalpacer - Google Play Store.
In the next 3 days I was able to build this app using VSCO on my Linux machine. I managed to provide 4 functionalities:
- Finish Time Calculator: Calculates finish time based on your pace for running, swimming and biking.
- Pace Calculator: Calculates the necessary pace for your desired finish time
- Heart Rate Zones Calculator: Estimate your heart rate zones based on your maximum heart rate
- Pace Converter: Converts paces from min/mile to min/km
Even if the design is pretty easy and far from perfect I am really happy with the result.
The last step is to publish the app on google play store. In the end this is more complicated then I have expected. At the moment I am in a state where I am searching for closed loop testers. As a private first time developer it is necessary to do a closed loop test with 20 people, before you can publish to the play store.