A Bridge to the Native Side of Development

The number one reason to use Flutter is its cross-platform capabilities. Flutter’s cross-platform utility is so great that it’s easy to forget about its connection with the underlying native platforms. For most of your Flutter development, you probably won’t even need to touch a line of native code, but eventually, you might encounter a use case that will require going down to the native layer. It could be a third-party SDK that doesn’t have an official Flutter plugin or a new feature available on a new version of the native OS that you’re just too eager to try out even before it gets official support.

In this chapter, we will overview the architecture of a Flutter application and how it connects to the native layer. We will learn how to access this layer with the tools available out of the box, as well as explore a better way to implement this functionality.

We will cover the following main topics...