Chapter 9: Popular Third-Party Plugins

In the previous chapter, we learned about what a plugin is and how it is used, and we experimented with our first plugin.

Flutter has a rich set of Flutter plugins, and sometimes it can be hard to know where to start from; you don't know what you don't know! This chapter will highlight some of the most popular plugins and give an overview of their uses.

We will start this chapter by looking into the Firebase plugins. Firebase is a set of services available on Google Cloud that you can use to create apps with advanced features. This includes authenticating users, storing data, sending push notifications, and analyzing app usage, among many other features.

We will then look at how to use Google Places for map and location information. Many apps have address lookups or show locations on a map, and the Google Places plugins really help here.

Next, we will look at plugins that exercise the capabilities of the device the app is...