Sharing your application with real users in real environments before your app goes live has to be one of the most exciting stages of app development. You get to release your application to targeted users to test and uncover bugs in your app — in other words, to beta test it. Speed and automation are critical factors when releasing your app to beta testers.

In this tutorial, we will learn the definitions of the different stages of production and their importance in development. We will also cover how to use different Firebase configurations in various environments. Additionally, we will learn about bloc widgets and what they do while managing our state in our Flutter application.

In this article, we’ll compare these two state management solutions by using both of them to build a simple counter application with React Native.

This is a story about how I switched from Android development to Flutter. About 10 years ago, I created my first Android application. I worked for a company that focused on mobile development — iOS and Android. For me, Android development was the obvious choice. I liked Java more than Objective-C, and in general, Android was more affordable. However, mobile development has changed a lot over the years. There are so many new languages, technologies, and architectures.

Apple recently announced that starting from April 25, 2022, all iOS or iPadOS apps you submit to the App Store need to be built with Xcode 13 (or later). This means that Xcode 12 is now deprecated, and people using Xcode 12 or older can no longer publish their apps to the App Store without upgrading their Xcode version. Each year, Apple decides to deprecate the older version of Xcode and stop allowing apps built with it to be uploaded to the store.

In the development world, it’s very common for technologies to be rapidly updated to introduce new features that improve the development experience and performance. These updates are very beneficial for developers because they allow them to create better products. This is especially the case when a CI/CD like Codemagic is used for continuous deployment that streamlines the process of delivering new products.

Code review is a widely adopted approach in the world of software development. Having fellow developers check your code (and checking theirs in turn) helps eliminate mistakes, clean the codebase, and share knowledge across the team. But as helpful as it is, code review can still be quite stressful and time consuming.

Before continuous integration was invented, developers had to work on code separately before merging it into the end product. This technique had a high chance of error. If something was left out, it took time to determine the problem. Furthermore, communication between team members became difficult as the project grew. The larger the project, the more developers, engineers, and project owners were supposed to be faithful to each other’s schedules.

This article highlights three technologies that you can combine to create a super-app: Flutter, Firebase, and Codemagic. Our task is to configure Firebase for all platforms supported by the Flutter framework, utilize Firebase Remote Config to alter the appearance of our app without making these changes manually and then set up CI/CD using Codemagic to distribute our app via Firebase App Distribution. We’ll be creating a live demo of the app to demonstrate the power of these technologies.