Linux Desktop app with Flutter | Publish on Snapcraft Tutorial

Flutter is Google’s UI framework to make apps for Android, iOS, Web, Windows, Mac, Linux, and Fuchsia OS. Since the last 2 years, the flutter Framework has already achieved popularity among mobile developers to develop Android and iOS apps.  In the last few releases, Flutter also added the support of making web applications and desktop applications. 

Introduction

Flutter Desktop is now in alpha release and recently Canonical enables Linux desktop app support with Flutter in Linux distribution including Ubuntu. By this Linux support in Flutter, it’s easy for developers to publish their apps for Linux users also via Snapcraft Store.

In this article, I will tell you how to publish your own Linux Desktop app in Flutter on Snapcraft SnapStore. I am going to use the default Sample Counter Application created by Flutter.

Note: Flutter Desktop is not stable yet, so you might face some issues or app crashes.

1. Install Flutter SDK on Ubuntu

There are many methods to set up this on Linux but this is one of them. Type command

snap install flutter

2. Enable Flutter Desktop in Flutter SDK

Currently, Flutter is in stable channel we need to switch to master channel using command

flutter channel master

To support flutter desktop in flutter SDK you need to enable desktop config using:

flutter config --enable-linux-desktop

NOTE: After completing above steps make sure your update flutter SDK flutter upgrade

To make Flutter Desktop run on Linux you will also need Linux toolchain