With the latest release of Flutter, Windows is officially supported, and this is a great LEAP of Flutter. However, the road to desktop is not simple. Simply running the same app on desktop is not fully supporting desktop. The app must adapt to desktop and should even include desktop specific features.
AnimeGo was first created in late 2017, and it was only meant for Android. React Native was used for development, and the app was not that good. However, I got one thing right, and that is the drawer. It was just the Android design, but I am glad that I didn’t use the bottom navigation because it has a maximum of 5 tabs. AnimeGo had only 5 tabs in the beginning, but now, it has two more. This is very difficult to do if I am using the bottom navigation.
Later, I switched to Flutter, and this is why the project is called AnimeGo-Re. This was just to support iOS, and I was also experimenting with Flutter. This was a great decision in the end because the app was much better. Flutter paints the same UI on iOS & Android, and this is not what React Native can do without third party UI libraries.
During the rewrite, I added support for tablets so the app shows more content if the screen is large enough, and the drawer becomes a side menu. However, the episode page and the anime page were still the same as mobile. This wasn’t good enough, and I decided to improve on it.
Earlier this year, I started working on the desktop version of AnimeGo. Flutter had supported desktop in beta for a very long time. This is why I had a desktop branch, and the app worked on all platforms. However, simply running on desktop was not enough, and I could do better.
This was why I introduced a new interface, Embeddable. It is a simple interface, but it allows pages to be embeddable like a widget. The page will do some adjustments so that it is like a widget but a complicated one. This way, I merged anime page and episode page so the UI is now more tablet like.
This is just the beginning. Desktop apps are much more complex than mobile apps. Side menu and side by side are more like a toy because they can have more pages side by side and also tabs on top. Ideally, the app should always show the side menu wherever it is. There should also be tabs on the top so multiple searches and episodes can be done. This is something truly unique to desktop.
From mobile to tablet and from tablet to desktop, the app should adapt to all devices no matter the size. This is a challenging task for us, the developers. However, I always want to do my best to make sure my apps work well on all devices. I don’t want to abandon a single user, but this is extremely difficult because I am so limited.
The road is still long, but one day, it will be done.