Update: Flutter Community Plus Plugins

The Plus Plugins are a suite of open-source Flutter plugins that take some of the most common existing packages to the next level!

Published in

Flutter Community

4 min readDec 21, 2020

Plug Plugins builds on the Flutter Team’s plugins' foundation to enable Flutter developers to build their apps for different platforms out of the box. Since we have announced Plus Plugins on October 13, 2020, there has been done a lot. We want to share what we have planned and achieved.

Here is a list of plus plugins that we have been working on:

Documentation website

plus.fluttercommunity.dev was created to display our progress in supporting different platforms. However, we have extended this platform to support and contains all documentation too. The production-ready website will be released soon.

Cleanup

We did a big clean up on all of our packages and upgraded or updated all implementation. You can see in our git history what we have done so far.

Platforms support

Since the last announcement, we have been working hard to support all platforms, and we have nearly achieved it. I am delighted to announce that we now fully support Android, iOS, Web, and Linux (except sensors_plus) for all plugins. Since there are minimal Linux devices that have sensors, sensors_plugin is still a work in progress. We need to test this plugin on more devices to ensure the quality of the plugin.

Windows and macOS are also in progress, with only two plugins left, respectively, either in PR or a work-in-progress-branch. These branches or PRs will be resolved after the holiday season, hopefully.

Addressing Issues

One of the team's most important goals is to address all issues that have been open on the Flutter repository. We have transferred and prioritized all from Flutter repository issues to our repository.

You can check our list here:

Please let us know if we are missing your issues.

Network Info Plus

We have started developing a new plugin that will cover information about the network on all different platforms. For example, it’s nice to have Ethernet info on desktop or wifi info on all platforms.

Tests

We already have good test cases. However, we still think we can expand our test and code coverage. Therefore, we will reevaluate our tests, write more, and increase code coverage up to 100%.

Null Safety

We are aiming to update our plugins to become null-safe compatible. We have already experimented with null-safety migration. Starting from January 2021, we will start migrating our plugins and release new versions.

Your Contributions

The Flutter Community Plus Team hopes that you, our amazing Flutter developers, and awesome followers, can give our plus packages a try and help us find out about potential bugs by opening an issue or perhaps fixing or improving these plugins by sending your top-notch PR. After all, we are developing these plugins for all of us. Let’s make them better together.

Road Map

We now have updated our roadmap. We support Federated Plugins and have already implemented most of the platforms, and will continue adding the remaining platforms by mid-January 2021.

We have come to a pretty stable version so far. We have updated all of our packages with several great commits. All packages are now pretty stable. There are several branches already that team is working on to have remaining Windows and macOS platforms. Here is our plan:

Sending PRs to Flutter engine to support missing functionalities that we need for different packages
Move all issues from original repo to plus plugins repo to address accordingly
Finalize PRs and WIP branches for Windows
Finalize PRs and WIP branches for macOS
Improve CD/CI and add additional checks for quality
Introduce NetworkInfoPlus Plugins
Migrate to support null-safety fully
Documentation website
Update all examples
Release all packages with new major version
Setup Code coverage
Finalize all-new integration and unit tests
Score 110 for all plugins

Feedback

We would like to hear from you. We need to know what you are expecting from us, Plus plugins. If we miss a feature or found a bug or anything else, please open an issue and let us know.

Summary

The plus plugins are pretty stable at the moment, but we are targeting to become even better. Therefore, we were hoping you could come back to us with your invaluable feedback. Thank you for your support — we are building all of these plugins just for you.

Last, special thanks to our amazing contributors who could not release these packages without them.

Merry Christmas and happy new year.