Announcing NEW Flutter SDKs for Channels and Beams

In our 2021 SDK survey, Pusher users said that Flutter was one of the most wanted additions to our library. We’ve been working on a broad project to expand our SDKs and today we’re launching the first release from that project. Our official Flutter SDKs for both Channels and Beams are now live.

Flutter is growing fast. Since its release in 2017, the Google framework has built an amazing following, to become one of the most loved open-source kits available to developers today.

There are a number of reasons which explain why, despite its relative youth, Flutter is so popular in 2022. It’s versatile, has an easy learning curve and iterates multi-platform code very quickly. Simply put, Flutter streamlines development. Few other options provide the breadth of support, not to mention the high-level performance Flutter provides.

The Pusher APIs are designed to reduce your cost, time to market and maintenance, with exceptional scaling capabilities. Pusher lets you bring attractive and engaging realtime features to your users on any platform – working hand in hand with Flutter’s benefits.

Quick start tutorials

Further to this, both tools can be picked up very quickly, so they’re perfect for prototyping and proof of concept. You can jump into our new tutorials for Channels or Beams to start experimenting with Pusher and Flutter now.

Community-led development

Beams

When we were investigating the best way to build a Flutter SDK for Beams notifications, we started by looking at what the community was doing. We’ve seen a lot of strong work by the Pusher community in the past to pull together unofficial repos, and love to share their work. We noticed that the gardun0/pusher_flutter_beams repo was pretty advanced and well architected. We reached out to the developer, Jorge Garduño and proposed that we sponsor the work to make it ready for a wider audience so that it could be released as an official SDK.

Jorge did a great job on the plugin, which uses Pigeon for a fast and type-safe platform plugin interface and a Federated Plugin architecture from Flutter.

The new Flutter library currently supports both Android and iOS platforms and offers the same feature set as the Java and Swift libraries for Android and iOS. Including:

• Managing interests
• Publishing notifications to specific user or multiple devices
• Handling incoming notifications when the app is in foreground mode.

We’re working on adding web support as well. If you’re planning to integrate the Beams SDK for full cross-platform functionality, keep an eye on our announcements.

Channels

The Pusher Channels Flutter client proved to be a more complex undertaking, and we started almost from scratch. The client is built with wrappers over pusher-js for Web, Pusher’s Java SDK for Android and Swift for IOS, so we’re standing on the shoulders of giants.

The Channels SDK utilises our native libraries, supports Android, iOS, and the Web for full multi-platform realtime capabilities with Flutter.

You can expect to have as many features that we offer on other libraries. That currently includes:

• Authorised connections
• Support for different channel types (public, private, and presence)
• Global event binding
• Client events
• Listening to members list on presence channels

The Pusher Flutter SDKs are available on GA now. If you’re not set up with Pusher yet, you can sign up and start building with our free sandbox plan today

Which SDK are you looking forward to seeing next?