Responsive & Adaptive Design in Flutter within 5 minutes
In this article, I’ll be demonstrating how to create an Adaptive and Responsive UI in Flutter, specifically for a WhatsApp-like application that can run on both mobile and desktop platforms. You can find more detailed video tutorials on YouTube, here. Our goal is to showcase the responsive and adaptive capabilities of Flutter, so please bear with me as the UI might not be the most visually appealing.
Adaptive and Responsive UI are two important concepts in modern web and mobile app development.
Adaptive UI refers to designing a user interface that adjusts and changes based on the device or screen size it is being displayed on. This means that the layout and design of the UI adapt to the specific screen size, resolution, and aspect ratio of the device, providing an optimal viewing experience.
Responsive UI, on the other hand, refers to designing a user interface that adjusts based on the size of the screen or viewport. This means that the layout and design of the UI respond to changes in the screen size, adjusting dynamically so that the content remains usable and readable.
Combining both concepts in a single design approach results in an Adaptive and Responsive UI, which can provide an optimal viewing experience on a wide range of devices, from small mobile screens to large desktop monitors.
So, let’s go to the implementation section.
Shortly, we need to create a ResponsiveLayout widget for our application, and it will provide mobile and desktop layouts for us.
Here, we check if the maxWidth property is less than one number (here we use 768 for it), then we can say use the mobile layout for our application. In the else section, we consider the other case, that is for the desktop layout. You can expand the conditions if you wish. For tutorial purposes, I kept it simple.
After that, we can use our ResponsiveLayout widget to create our layouts. For example, in the mobile layout, there is a bottom navigation bar, and for the desktop layout, there is a sidebar. They have different page sizes, and because of that, we need to consider the sizes of the devices.
You can see the output images below for the macOS, Android, and iOS platforms:
I hope you learned something new and useful about creating an Adaptive and Responsive UI in Flutter. Don’t forget to clap and follow me for more articles on Flutter. Thank you for reading!
