App Development Fundamentals

Why Flutter? Cross-Platform in One Codebase

Building an app for both iPhone and Android used to mean building it twice. Flutter lets you write it once and get both — that's the whole idea, and it's a big deal.

Dart Basics

Dart is the language Flutter apps are written in, and if you've ever brushed up against JavaScript or Java, its variables, functions and classes will feel comfortably familiar.

Flutter Widgets Basics

A StatelessWidget describes a piece of screen that never changes on its own, like a printed poster — it's the simplest widget and the natural place to start.

Layouts: Row, Column and Container

Column stacks widgets vertically, Row lines them up horizontally, and Container wraps a widget in padding, size, or a background — together these three build nearly every screen you'll ever make.

State Management Basics

A StatefulWidget can redraw itself when its data changes — setState() is the phrase you use to tell Flutter "something just changed, please redraw this."

Navigating Between Screens

Flutter treats your app's screens like a stack of plates — Navigator.push places a new one on top, Navigator.pop lifts it off and reveals whatever was underneath.

Working with Lists: ListView

Real apps rarely show a fixed handful of items — ListView is Flutter's widget for displaying a scrollable list of however many items your data actually has, built efficiently no matter how long that list gets.

Forms and User Input

TextField and TextEditingController are how a Flutter app captures what a user types — the same building block behind every login form, search box, and comment box you'll ever build.

Making API Calls from a Flutter App

Most real apps aren't self-contained — they fetch data from a server over the internet using the exact same request/response pattern from the AI Fundamentals course, just for regular app data instead of AI responses.

Local Storage: Remembering Data on the Device

Not everything needs a server — SharedPreferences lets a Flutter app save small pieces of data directly on the phone itself, so simple settings and preferences survive even after the app is closed.

Styling and Theming Your App Consistently

Setting colors and fonts one widget at a time gets messy fast — Flutter's ThemeData lets you define your app's look once, centrally, and have every widget pick it up automatically.