From Frustration to Success: My Flutter Story

I want to share a recent experience that tested my skills and patience but ultimately taught me so much about problem-solving and perseverance.

I was tasked with working on an old Flutter project—one that had a legacy architecture and more challenges than I initially expected. The setup was complex: one main package and seven dependent packages. Among these, the UI and Network packages stood out as the foundation since they were used across all the other packages and the main package itself.

As soon as I started, I realised the project needed a complete overhaul to work with the latest Flutter version. But the road to getting it up and running was far from straightforward.

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The first hurdle was setting up Git connections since all the packages were added via Git clones in the pubspec.yaml. I needed to establish an SSH connection to GitHub from both my Mac M2 and my Windows workstation. Sounds simple, right? Not quite.

On my Mac, I faced endless issues—connections kept dropping, and SSH just wouldn’t cooperate. After hours of troubleshooting and experimenting, I found a solution. Surprisingly, the Android Terminal played a vital role in fixing the problem. With that sorted, I moved on to the next challenge.

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With the Git connection established, I dove into the code. I quickly identified that the UI and Network packages were at the core of the project, so I started updating them first. This meant migrating Dart code to the latest standards, updating dependencies, and replacing deprecated packages with modern alternatives.

Once those were updated, I pushed the changes to the master branch and moved on to the dependent packages.

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Here’s where things got tricky. Even after resolving issues in the dependent packages, the main package kept throwing the same errors. I was stumped. After some digging, I learned about the pubspec.lock file. It turns out, this file can sometimes hold onto old dependency versions even after updates.

So, I removed the pubspec.lock file in all the packages, cleaned the Flutter cache, and fetched everything again. Finally, the dependency issues were resolved—at least for the moment.

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Just as I thought I had crossed the finish line, another roadblock appeared—native code issues related to VoIP. Debugging this was no small feat, but I eventually resolved the errors, and the app finally ran on both Android and iOS.

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This journey wasn’t just about fixing a project—it was about understanding a tangled web of dependencies, learning how Flutter handles lock files, and finding ways to debug issues that aren’t always obvious.

The app is now up and running, but this experience left me reflecting on how much I’ve grown as a developer. If you’ve ever worked on a legacy Flutter project or found yourself stuck in a similar situation, you’ll know how rewarding it is to finally see things come together.

Have you faced challenges like this? I’d love to hear your stories—or if you’re currently stuck, let me know, and we can brainstorm solutions together!