Flutter on Raspberry Pi 4

This article continues from where the previous Android 10 on Raspberry Pi 4 article left off. Now that we have done all the hard work setting up the platform, it’s time to move on to experimenting with Flutter.

Flutter Gallery running on Raspberry Pi 4

In order to start developing with Flutter on your Raspberry Pi, connect the device to WiFi in the Settings app, and check the IP address in:

Settings > Device Preferences > About > Status > IP address

Once you know the IP address, you can connect with ADB. For example:

$ adb connect 192.168.86.212:5555
connected to 192.168.86.212:5555
$ adb devices -l
List of devices attached
192.168.86.212:5555    device product:rpi4 model:Raspberry_Pi_4 device:rpi4 transport_id:1

Open up a Flutter project in the IDE of your choice and the Raspberry Pi will show up just like any other Android device.

VS Code — Android 10 on Raspberry Pi 4

Android Studio — Android 10 on Raspberry Pi 4

Thanks to Android, everything works out of the box. There’s no difference to running Flutter on Android mobiles. Here’s a video recording of the Flutter Gallery app running in release mode.

Flutter on Raspberry Pi 4

For what it’s worth, I’m aware of the flutter-pi and flutter_wayland projects that provide GLFW and Wayland -based Flutter embedders. Even though the high-level goal is the same, to run Flutter on embedded devices, I wanted to try out a slightly different approach with AOSP. Basing off on Android has the advantage that the vanilla Flutter SDK for Android, and all the tooling around it, work out of the box. Furthermore, running Android opens up such possibilities as installing a ready-made full-fledged on-screen keyboard on the device.