Flutter State Management Overview with Waleed Arshad

In this episode, my guest is Waleed Arshad and we talk about state management in Flutter.

Waleed is Pakistan’s first Google Developer Expert in Flutter and GDE in Dart. He’s the author of the book “Managing State in Flutter Pragmatically: Discover how to adopt the best state management approach for scaling your Flutter app“.

We talked about why state management is such a hot topic amongst Flutter developers and we talked about different state management options: setState, InheritedWidget, Provider, Riverpod, Bloc, Cubit, MobX, and more. We also discussed whether choosing this or that state management library is even so important as we previously thought if we layer, design, architect our application correctly.

At the time of recording this episode, I couldn’t read the book yet, it wasn’t public yet, but since we recorded I bought the book and read most of it, and I can only recommend it.

Guest: Waleed Arshad

• Twitter @wal_33d
• GitHub @wal33d006
• LinkedIn @waleed006
• Web wal33d006.github.io

Book: Managing State in Flutter Pragmatically

• Packt
• amazon.com
• amazon.de
• Google Books

Host: Vince Varga

• Twitter @vincevargadev
• GitHub @vincevargadev
• LinkedIn @vincevargadev
• Web vincevarga.dev
• Flutter 101 Podcast on Twitter @flutter101dev

Most relevant past episodes from Flutter 101

• RVMS architecture, get_it, commands, and more with Thomas Burkhart (Episode 3): Thomas Burkhart is a GDE for Flutter and Dart. He's the author of popular packages, like get_it, and flutter_command. We talked about the RVMS architecture.
• Flutter Development Experience with Chris Sells (Episode 16): Chris Sells is a Senior Product Manager at Google on Flutter. Chris is responsible for the end-to-end development experience, as well as tooling, the package ecosystem, and the desktop platform support.

Mentioned packages

• pub.dev/packages/provider: A wrapper around InheritedWidget to make them easier to use and more reusable.
• pub.dev/packages/bloc: A predictable state management library that helps implement the BLoC (Business Logic Component) design pattern.
• pub.dev/packages/flutter_bloc: Flutter Widgets that make it easy to implement the BLoC (Business Logic Component) design pattern. Built to be used with the bloc state management package.
• pub.dev/packages/get_it: Simple direct Service Locator that allows to decouple the interface from a concrete implementation and to access the concrete implementation from everywhere in your App
• pub.dev/packages/mobx: MobX is a library for reactively managing the state of your applications. Use the power of observables, actions, and reactions to supercharge your Dart and Flutter apps.
• pub.dev/packages/redux: Redux is a predictable state container for Dart and Flutter apps
• pub.dev/packages/binder: A lightweight, yet powerful way to bind your application state with your business logic.

Other resources

• Flutter state management for minimalists by @suragch1
• Flutter Docs: State Management