Using flutter mobile packages in flutter web

Question

I am using flutter web and I want to use some packages that are available for the mobile in the web version of flutter. The pubspec of flutter web look a bit different from that of flutter mobile but this is not the real problem. What I am concerned about is that is it possible to add the packages availble for mobile into that of the web. If yes, what is the proper way to do so?

Answer 1

This is not currently possible (as of June 2019) for any package which is dependent on the mobile OS. The reason for this is that the plugins on mobile use platform channels to communicate with platform-dependent code implementations for Android and iOS written in java/kotlin for android or objc/swift for iOS.

The only way those packages would ever work on the web is if a web-specific implementation were written for them which I assume would either use an emscripten-compiled library or more likely some sort of javascript bridge to call the relevant browser APIs.

From the flutter for web readme:

flutter_web does not have a plugin system yet. Temporarily, we provide access to dart:html, dart:js, dart:svg, dart:indexed_db and other web libraries that give you access to the vast majority of browser APIs. However, expect that these libraries will be replaced by a different plugin API.

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For any plugin that is 100% dart code, you should be able to just include it in your pubspec.yaml the same way you would in flutter - under dependencies.