Which Flutter Bluetooth Low Energy Library To Choose

When developing mobile Apps with Flutter, you will quickly determine that there is no officially supported Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) library which can be used in building your BLE-enabled Apps. This article is to help developers new to Flutter to decide between the most prominent Flutter BLE libraries available as of 2023.

The three main Flutter BLE libraries are Flutter Blue (flutter_blue) and it's successor Flutter Blue Plus (flutter_blue_plus), Flutter BLE Lib (flutter_ble_lib) by Polidea and the Phillips Hue library (flutter_reactive_ble).

The Flutter Blue library received its last commit some two years ago and maintenance has stopped. Hence this library should now be avoided. Its successor Flutter Blue Plus is actively maintained but at this stage it is not clear how reliable this library is in a production environment, as the previous Flutter Blue version had issues with updates breaking some parts of the library.

Flutter BLE Lib was originally written by the developers at a Polish company called Polidea which has been bought by the Snowflake cloud service provider and even though the library is pretty much complete including the provision of a Blemulator library to simulate an actual BLE device (works only with Flutter BLE Lib), there is no further support from Polidea and maintenance is rather slow for both libraries, hence they are not ideal for production use. Null safety is not supported by this library.

That's leaves the last library on the list, the Philipps Hue library, which is well maintained by Phillips, has good features, can support multiple BLE devices and my experience with this library has been good and I can recommend this library for BLE-enabled Apps on both the Android & iOS platforms.

The Flutter Gems site maintains a list of useful Flutter & Dart packages for many different areas which may be of interest to you.

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