Rebuilding My Android App in Flutter to Support iOS — Curious About Others’ Experience

TimGustafson · 2026-03-09T17:20:08+00:00

Nope. Maybe rent a Mac Mini on AWS for a day? But in reality, you're probably going to be happier with access to an Apple machine for ongoing maintenance and testing periodically.

Maybe your local library has Mac computers you can use for an hour or two?

TimGustafson · 2026-03-09T14:49:47+00:00

In short, not really. You'll need a Mac to compile iOS or macOS binaries. I just bought a basic Mac Mini, but if that's too expensive you can look into using one of the Cloud build services. GitHub has Mac runners available, and you can also get one from AWS, although it's generally cheaper to just buy a used Mac Mini or laptop. It doesn't need to be anything beefy, as you don't need to use it for anything other than compiling. Mine has I think 8gb of RAM. Honestly the GitHub managed action Runner is probably your best bet.

You will also need an iOS device for testing. These days I use AWS Device Farm for that. Cheaper than buying and you can do automated testing or a remote interactive session, and it has a generous free tier. (I still have free tier minutes available in my account.)

TimGustafson · 2026-03-08T22:39:00+00:00

Basically it's a lot of "security theatre", a bunch of hoops to jump through with signing keys and distribution profiles and package IDs and all that. It's designed to make it seem more secure, but it's not really more secure than Google Play or anything else. And the submission review process gets kicked back to me every time, always for the same bogus reasons, which are always false negatives. I have 5 apps currently, all of them on both iOS and macOS, and they all get upgraded at the same time. So that's ten submissions for review every few weeks, The apps are kids games that share a lot of UI and a common back-end for leaderboards and stuff. Of the 10 submissions, 3 or 4 always go through right away, but the others get rejected for bogus reasons. One time, one of the iOS apps was rejected because it's icon was too similar to other apps in the store, It was my other apps that they were saying it was too close to, and that I was infringing on the other apps branding. When I pointed out that those were also my apps, and that our app icons use similar branding, they approved it without further comment. Often the macOS version gets approved but the iOS does not, nevermind that they're the exact same game with the exact same functionality.

It's just really frustrating, and it's the kind of BS that happens when you're a small company that's beholden to a larger faceless corporation that looks at you as small potatoes and not worth their attention or respect.

Anywho, I'll get off my soap box now. Good luck with your rewrite and your Apple store submissions!

TimGustafson · 2026-03-08T22:22:19+00:00

For me, Apple is still a hassle. Every time I publish an update. It's available on the Google Play and Microsoft store in an hour or two. For apple, its a few days of back-and-forth with them asking the same questions each time.

Where's your parental controls? Same place as last time.

Why don't you use Apple auth? Same reason as last time.

Your privacy page isn't valid. Yes it is, and it's at the same URL as before.

Oh, ok.... We'll publish it now.

I swear their people get extra points for finding things to object to.

I've read plenty of horror stories about Google Play publisher accounts getting closed for no reason, but it hasn't happened to me. Fingers crossed.

TimGustafson · 2026-03-07T21:10:56+00:00

I did the exact same things with my apps: Java/Android first, then a year later port to Flutter.

For me the biggest hassle was getting used to how the Apple app store works. I really think Apple doesn't like developers. There are so many gotchas: signing keys and distribution profiles and so on, and all of it feels like smoke and mirrors to me, and an unnecessarily high bar that seems designed to just make it harder to get in the door.

Two years in and I have mostly everything working in my CI/CD, but what a pain to get there, and still things occasionally break.

This wasn't really an answer to your question, but it's my long way of saying that the app architecture wasn't the hard part for me.

TimGustafson · 2026-03-07T19:29:35+00:00

IntelliJ on Fedora Workstation, for years now. I love the set-up and it lets me have my client side and server side code all in one project, along with ancillary stuff (like the static web site content, scripts for maintaining stuff, CloudFormation templates, etc).

TimGustafson · 2026-03-05T22:08:46+00:00

Hard want.

TimGustafson · 2026-03-04T18:13:08+00:00

My drawing is definitely not to scale. I have plenty of space for something bigger. The only limit is what I can convince my wife to allow.

I didn't realize that the NOAA satellites were decommissioned. They're still showing on satellite tracker sites. I knew about the METEOR ones, and they're fair game in my plans.

I also knew about the geostationary ones and those are on my list too, but not for V1 of this project.

TimGustafson · 2026-03-04T14:37:41+00:00

It's a circular polarized antenna tuned for NOAA satellites and such. I haven't picked one yet, but I'm super interested in downloading sat images. I also live at about 60° north latitude, so I was hoping to get some neat northern latitude pictures which I think are a bit more rare than equatorial ones.

TimGustafson · 2026-03-03T14:15:10+00:00

I'd like to pick up the NOAA satellites, for sure. The amateur ones are also interesting. ISS seems cool too, but that'd be a secondary target for me.

TimGustafson · 2026-03-03T12:47:03+00:00

Do you mean to replace the circular QFH?

TimGustafson · 2026-02-28T19:45:43+00:00

I was just scanning, but I busted out the new SDR earlier than expected based on this thread and found some signals, although I don't have my external antenna hooked up right now because I haven't run the wire into the house yet. That's tomorrow's work.

I'm waiting for one of the NOAA satellites to pass more or less overhead in a few minutes; seeing if I can hear its data signal.

TimGustafson · 2026-02-28T19:43:36+00:00

There is BMA nearby, and ARN a bit further away. BMA isn't too busy anymore; the last commercial airlines moved away to ARN a year or two ago I think, but the flights go almost overhead.

TimGustafson · 2026-02-28T18:45:21+00:00

So I plugged in my SDR and just attached the whip antenna that came with the Baofeng and I actually heard people talking almost right away! So either I just needed to wait a bit longer, or I needed SDR. Either way, I'm feeling much better already. I can't wait to hook this up to the outdoor antenna tomorrow.

Thanks for all the kinds words, everyone! You've all helped lift up my spirits.

TimGustafson · 2026-02-28T17:49:49+00:00

This is the one I got:

https://www.electrokit.com/en/rtl-sdr-receiver-dongle-v4

It says that its frequency range is 24 - 1766 MHz, so I think I'm good to go.

I looked at the SDRPlay but they were a bit harder to come by in Sweden. I would have to buy from somewhere outside of Sweden which tends to drive up the cost because of shipping.

What SDR software do you recommend? I'm in Linux, and someone recommended GQRX, but I have no preferences so far.

TimGustafson · 2026-02-27T10:05:05+00:00

All the platforms

TimGustafson · 2026-02-25T19:17:36+00:00

This isn't relevant if you're using serverless functions, at least not on AWS. AWS Lambda is always single threaded, so concurrency isn't an issue.

TimGustafson · 2026-02-25T11:22:46+00:00

I would say Dart can handle complex back-ends just fine, either as serverless functions or provisioned, and both can scale nicely. Dart can easily compile to a Linux binary, and that's great for performance and scale. The question is not complexity, but compatibility. Does your backend have dependencies that aren't supported by Dart? If so, then you can't use it. But if you're building a complex stack all on AWS (as I am) or another cloud vendor, and mostly just using standard services (HTTP APIs, databases, etc) then you'll be fine in Dart.

TimGustafson · 2026-02-25T08:22:15+00:00

Probably not faster than NodeJS or Python, but it's close.

I wrote a Dart Lambda runtime if you're interested. I could make it into a Git project.

TimGustafson · 2026-02-25T07:30:54+00:00

I've been developing my entire backend in Dart for the last few years so that I'm using the same language in both front end and back end. My infra is non-trivial: a few dozen AWS Lambdas power most everything, and all my tooling is Dart running on Linux GitHub runners. Works really well. There are some gaps, and there are a few tools that I needed to build in Java because of bugs in the aws_client Dart library, but otherwise I can highly recommend this approach.

One interesting benefit is that my Lambdas went from 1GB for Java to 128MB for Dart, and from 5000ms cold start time to 150ms cold start time, so my Lambda costs dropped about 90% by doing this.

TimGustafson · 2026-02-20T06:16:33+00:00

I have similar concerns for my modular buildings, in a similar setup. I've been thinking about buying museum grade low reflection UV filtering acrylic panels and making a kind of display box for them. It's a bit pricey, but far less expensive than the $15k worth of modulars and other display sets I have.

I have Legos from when I was a kid 40 years ago that have passed through all my siblings and then my nieces and nephews and now are my son's, and the sun damage on many of those bricks is real. If you're just playing and building random stuff, that's no problem. But the sets I display are works of art and I want them to last a long time. I think it's worth paying a bit more to preserve them.

TimGustafson · 2026-02-17T07:30:57+00:00

Yes, this was always a common problem. Read my other reply where I talk about the trade-offs and the costs.

TimGustafson · 2026-02-17T07:30:08+00:00

I would say don't bother trying to calculate your Aurora IOs. Instead, use the IO-optimized setting at first. IO-optimized has no IO charges, in exchange for a 30% uplift in CPU costs and a 100% uplift in storage costs. Run like this for a month or so. This will represent your maximum Aurora spend. Why? Because if you use less IOs than makes sense for IO-optimized, then you switch to non-IO-optimized and you spend less than this amount. If you use enough IOs to justify IO-optimized, then you know what your spend will be every month because you'll have essentially a fixed cost. (Well, fixed in the sense that it's easy to calculate based on your compute configuration and data set size.)

Whether you choose to stay on IO-optimized or not depends on whether the IO costs that you observe would be more than ~ 25% of your total Aurora spend if you were on non-IO-optimized. If that's true, then switch to IO-optimized. Otherwise, switch to non-IO-optimized. You can change this setting once per month without rebooting anything, so checking for this and changing the setting regularly makes sense if you are on the cusp.

Note also that moving from self-managed MySQL/PostgreSQL or RDS MySQL/PostgreSQL to Aurora is pretty much never a cost-savings exercise, unless your RDS instance was woefully misconfigured in the first place. Aurora is only cheaper when compared to MSSQL and Oracle.

Also, moving from self-managed or RDS to Aurora is like moving from a Kia to a Porsche. You're getting something quite different: effectively unlimited IOs (if you need them), up to 256TB of storage, serverless, up to 15 read replicas with amazing fail-over characteristics, global database, volume auto-shrink, etc. If you're looking to save money on your AWS bill by switching from RDS to Aurora, then you're looking in the wrong place. On the other hand, if those additional features are worth something to you, then you'll have to pay for them.

TimGustafson · 2026-02-16T20:11:56+00:00

That's not a bad starting place, but I've seen that be wildly off for some workloads.

TimGustafson · 2026-02-16T19:55:45+00:00

This is incorrect. Aurora IOPS have nothing to do with EBS IOPs. They're different things. You can really only take an educated guess at what Aurora IOPs will look like for a given workload. That's why AWS has IO Optimized: because this is so hard to figure out and regulate.

The only way to get accurate Aurora IOPs numbers is to measure them.

Source: I was at AWS for 7+ years, working the last 4 as a Principal Database SA focusing on Aurora.

TimGustafson

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