An Embedded Designer Looks at Mobile App Development

Releasing Your Flutter App to the App Stores

- By Bob Japenga

This month, Bob wraps up his article series on mobile app development from the perspective of an embedded systems designer. He looks at what it takes to release your Flutter app to the Apple and Google app stores, and then gives a high-level, opinionated, overview of the two paradigms—Flutter and React Native.

As I have discussed in previous articles in this series, I developed my React Native app using Expo. I found it easy to use with very few downsides. There were the normal quirks that we get from all software (I can’t believe I just said that!), with things not always working the same and the constant changes made underneath us that are maddening. But software developers like us have conditioned the public to expect that. It gives us a “get out of jail free” card for our lack of planning, design, and testing.

Expo provided Expo Application Services (EAS), which supplies services to simplify all aspects of alpha, beta, and production releases. I expected there to be something similar for Flutter for releasing the app to the app stores. Instead, I found a documentation page [1] that tells you how to release for Apple’s App Store and Google's Play Store. This documentation includes all kinds of esoteric files that I never had to deal while releasing with EAS. And the procedures between the two platforms are very different (Figure 1).

When I complained to a friend, a long time Flutter developer, he recommended that I look into CodeMagic [2] (Figure 2) When I created my account with them, they said that with CodeMagic you could automate the most time-consuming app release steps, such as code signing, building and uploading new app versions, and setting changelogs.