How to create an Android TV app using Flutter

At DLT Labs, mobile applications like DL Asset Track™, DL Wallet™, DL Certify™, DL Creds™, and We Agree™ are developed using Google’s Flutter UI toolkit. So, I am always looking for fun projects to get more practice using it.

As I had not explored developing an Android TV app using Flutter before, I thought of exploring it and sharing it with you all. In this article, you will learn how to create an app using Flutter for Android TV. You can also add support to your existing app by following the same process we will discuss now.

So, let’s get started.

Create a Flutter project. Once created, we need to configure the app for TV.

Configuring our app for the TV

We need to create a banner instead of an app icon, as TVs display a banner on the home screen. So we need to create a banner with a pixel size of 320x180. Once created, name it as banner.png, and copy it under the android/app/src/main/res/drawable folder.

In order to add a banner to our app, we need to mention the banner in the AndroidManifest.xml file:

<application
    android:name="io.flutter.app.FlutterApplication"
    android:label="flutter_android_tv"
    android:banner="@drawable/banner"
    android:icon="@mipmap/ic_launcher">
   …