Ensuring Seamless User Experience: Implementing In-App Updates in Flutter

In today’s fast-paced digital world, keeping your mobile applications up-to-date is crucial for delivering the best user experience. As part of my latest project, I developed an efficient method for checking and applying updates within a Flutter application. In this article, I’ll walk you through the process and share key snippets that make it all possible.

Introduction

The project I’m working on involves a Flutter application with a core feature to check for updates. This ensures users always have the latest features and fixes, providing a smooth and reliable experience.

First Approach: In-App Updates

Packages Used:-

To achieve the in-app update functionality, we utilized several packages:

1. PackageInfo: Retrieves the app’s current version information from the platform.
2. Dio: A powerful HTTP client for Dart, used to fetch version information from the Apple App Store.
3. flutter_app_version_checker: Checks for the latest version of the app available on the Play Store and App Store.
4. in_app_update: Provides in-app update functionality for Android.
5. url_launcher: Launches URLs, useful for directing users to the app store for updates.

Setting main

This is the main.dart file.

Here, we initialize any necessary services before running the app.

Building the User Interface

Our main interface is a simple Todo application. The focus of this article is not on the UI design but on the update mechanism, so I’ll keep this part brief.

Implementing Update Check:

In the HomeScreen widget, we call the checkUpdate method during initialization to ensure the app is up-to-date as soon as it starts.You can also check this on the Splash Screen

Update Service Class

The UpdateServices class contains the logic for checking updates for both Android and iOS platforms.

This method checks the current version of the app against the version available in the store and triggers an update if necessary. For iOS, it displays an update dialog. For Android, it performs an immediate update or shows an update dialog based on the version difference.

_UpDateRepo class

Version Comparator

To determine the type of update (major or minor), we use a VersionComparator utility.

Conclusion

Implementing an in-app update mechanism ensures that your users always have access to the latest features and improvements. This approach leverages packages like package_info_plus, flutter_app_version_checker,and in_app_updatefor version checking and update handling. By integrating these components, you can provide a seamless and user-friendly update experience.

In the next section, we’ll explore a second approach for checking updates, focusing on custom version comparison logic using Firebase Remote Config. Stay tuned for more details on how you can tailor update checks to fit your app’s specific needs.