Successfully release IAP in a production environment

Introduction

Conceptually, IAP is quite easy to understand and implement, there are many libraries and code snippets available out there. However, in order to have a secure and stable way to deal with IAP and protect your business is a different story.

This article will go through some common pain points, how things should be done and what to expect when you release your app in production. Note that the article will only focus on Consumable products.

Consumable Products

As described by Apple:

Users can purchase different types of consumables, such as lives or gems in…

Introduction

This article is a follow up on a rather older article I wrote on real-time messaging with Flutter, which was mainly going through some early days Flutter plugin development techniques.

We will present here our open-source plugin published in pub dev: https://pub.dev/packages/flutter_pubnub

Why did we implement such a plugin

Our main product at Ingenio: Keen (https://www.keen.com/) enables conversations between advisors (life coaches, psychics, …) and consumers in a marketplace environment. All communications, calls, and chats are charged by the minute.

Our current offering includes web, mobile web, and native apps channels. Our native apps are implemented natively on Android and iOS and target consumers. We needed an…

Introduction

Some applications need real-time messaging built in to implement various use cases. Some require publish, subscribe or both. In addition, some other apps may rely on presence, covering a wide range of use cases such as connections and disconnections from other users or systems.

My current company, Ingenio, enables connections between advisors and users, creating a marketplace where people can get the best life advices and interact via voice and real time chat.

In the current Flutter development of the new advisor application, we had the requirement for delivering real time messages using the platform current in used by our…

Animations to be taken with a grain of BLoC

Introduction

There have been lots of articles written about animations, some containing more or less complex code following (or not) recommended approaches. At the end, I needed to understand how to animate a button, execute a BLoC provided method and handle 3 states: start, success and failure.

In this article I will explain all the concepts I had to understand and assemble together into a complete solution (not just the animation part)

Staggered Animation Concepts

Flutter comes with an incredible way to animate widgets, reminding me of flipbook animations which is essentially a series of…

Introduction

Developers moving to Flutter are most likely new to Dart, and therefore are not aware of architecture and development approaches until faced with laggy UI or Flutter screens of death (error message instead of expected UI elements).

It all started while I was using the FutureBuilder widget. The issue seemed simple: How do I show a dialog in the event the REST API fails because of network issues (i.e. no network).

First thing I implemented caused the Flutter screen of death as shown below:

Introduction

With the introduction of Google’s Cross Platform, Flutter, development of apps can tremendously be accelerated. However, the sticky point, as in any Cross Platform environment lies in being able to access native platform features such as Camera, Bluetooth… All of these can be accessed via Plugins, exposing iOS and Android native code to Flutter applications.

Many articles cover pros and cons related to Flutter. A recurring cons revolves around the platform maturity and the lack of support of 3rd party frameworks (e.g. analytics) that are essential for launching a production application.

This article is not intended to compare Flutter with…