Mobile Development at Simpel Web

Our focus in on the implementation of modern and fast websites for small and medium-sized companies. Therefore, we have been working long and hard to find the perfect architecture for our bussiness. Nonetheless, it is important to not stand still and continuously improve.

“New is always better”
YouTube

This is almost always right. New technologies and frameworks inspire people and draw attention. We often believe that they are better. In software development – especially in the area of web – the world is moving faster and faster and it is important to remain vigilant and verify that your own TechStack is still state of the art. In our case we wanted to get the maximum value of our hosting provider Netlify. We wanted to have a comfortable way to make use of the Netlify API which allows us to control our projects better. By having an increasing number of applications it is getting harder and more time-consuming to do everything via the Netlify UI. So we create an app for an easier orchestration.

alpha version of “Togglify” on various devices

Togglify – a “Simpel” app

Flutter is currently the rising star in the field of cross platform development. It is possible to create apps for all platforms:

Android
iOS
Web
Desktop (Windows, macOS, Linux)
in a later stage also Fuchsia

As we are working with a bunch of different devices Flutter might be a good fit.

Setting up the development enviroment has become easier in the past years – also because of the comfortable diagnostic tool Flutter doctor. But still there are initial hurdles. In the end, we managed to get Flutter running locally having a fully configured development environment including a working project within the Android simulator.

As Flutter is similar to famous frameworks like React not much time was need to implement a first version of our application “Togglify”. The build process of the application for Android is working like a charm. In order to keep up the speed and have a consistent and fast development process, we used Github Actions. There are already many abstractions for the continous integration of Flutter applications out there. Using such an action allows to automatically have an installable version for

Android
Windows

for your current development status.

resulting installable artifacts from the Github Actions run

iOS – our problem child

IOS builds are possible but we do not have a fee-based developer account from Apple. That is way installing Togglify on an iOS device goes hand in hand with an increased effort. In a first step, the app bundle is generated using Codemagic. This bundle is then converted into a .ipa file which is deployed to the device via Sideloadly. This is of cource not the best approache for a productive application but it was at least a fast and charming way to develop for iOS without having a Mac.

As you can see, we managed to implement a small but nice application in a very short time which helps us to improve our daily work with Netlify and our applications hosted there. We already have plans to extend the functionality of the application and we do need see any big issues using Flutter in the future for that.

Sounds interesting to you? Do not hesitate to contact us!