Visiting Fluttercon EU 2025
Flutter, Android and More
This year was my first to visit Fluttercon Berlin, and to say the least, it was awesome!
Fluttercon and Droidcon are conferences taking place around the world every year and one of the places is Berlin.
Since I am a Flutter developer at my day job at the moment and a former Android dev, there is no better conference to attend.
Flutter
There is so much to talk about here, but I will keep it short.
I recommend searching in Fluttercon/Droidcon YouTube channel for published videos and have a look at what interests you.
The topics vary from UI, architecture, best practices and experiments.
Here is a short list of what I have seen and recommend watching in no particular order:
- Let’s Talk About Memory Leaks in Dart and Flutter by Majid Hajian
- Lessons learned after helping more than 2000 Flutter teams build their design system by Lucas Josefiak
- Crash-Proof Flutter: Building Apps That Refuse to Die by
- Server-Side Rendering for Flutter Web: Promising Paths or Dead End? by Simon Auer
- RenderObject layer advantages without writing any RenderObjects by Albers Wolszon
- Live-Coding With Simon (Part II) by Simon Lightfoot and Kevin Moore
I will add links to these talks once they are published on YouTube.
For sure, there are plenty more great talks, and I have to find them. Definitely, I want to look into some of these more in the future, and you can expect more articles on similar topics as I will be exploring them!
Flutter’s idea is that the code should be portable. The code could be slammed into any environment, and it should work. Flutter is doing a great job at this, but there are still a lot of pieces to make the image complete.
Shorebird, a small company which makes distribution of the apps much easier, is trying to fill in the missing pieces, and I highly recommend watching the opening keynote by Eric Siedel on it.
AI
Of course, what would the conference be without adding AI to it?
There is a rise of local LLMs among the mobile apps.
Nowadays, the local LLMs, with a size of 0.5–4GB, are becoming quite capable at routine tasks. They do not have as much knowledge as cloud counterparts, but with proper RAG implementation, they are becoming good at synthesizing the data together.
I have to give a try to Cactus implementation as they created their own LLM inference, which actually does not use a GPU.
GPU is power-hungry, and execution on CPU is much cheaper from a hardware perspective.
If you appropriately decompose the LLM graph and offload the computation to CPU, TPU and other parts of the hardware properly, you can actually gain higher performance and less memory usage than with a GPU alone.
Enjoyed talking to these folks, go visit their repo: Cactus. They support more platforms rather than Flutter only.
Linux and Web
Following learnings are coming from the Kevin Moore keynote - introduction to the conference. Here is link to the conference video. I could not agree more with the Kevin on his takes.
Linux
Many people perceive Flutter as a multiplatform framework for iOS and Android. However, you can do much more with it.
Everyone knows that Flutter supports web and desktop implementations, but at the conference I learnt that actually some UIs in Ubuntu are actually built in Flutter. This may have flown under my radar, but it makes total sense now. Canonical, developers of Ubuntu Linux distribution, helped to develop Flutter bindings for Linux and they started to build apps and UIs for Ubuntu in Flutter.
Moreover, Linux has gained popularity in recent years for development to run all software. Windows supports WSL and macOS now, bringing Linux containers.
Web
Flutter supports web, and it is totally different from any other web framework.
Most of the frameworks support DOM, but Flutter? Flutter draws everything into the canvas.
Web developers probably left room at this moment, because the DOM is such a crucial aspect of web development, but hear me out now.
For certain use cases, it is actually more beneficial to let the implementation draw into the canvas than to actually try to use web elements.
Great examples are video/image editing software, maps, games and other graphics/rendering-heavy apps. Those apps need to show you some UI and graphics at the same time, and using a framework like Flutter makes it suddenly easy to do them. Moreover, they will be performant out of the box, since Flutter directly communicates with the GPU via WebGL.
Me personally, I do not see Flutter viable for static sites or regular websites. It just takes a lot of memory for initial download - 7MB for Flutter runtime. Eventhough, the Flutter team plans to decrease it with migration to Impeller, it is still too much. It should stay this way. You should use Astro/React/Angular for those. Many companies invested a lot into these frameworks and they should be used. However, if you need to draw a lot of things, I would go for Flutter.
Even this web is Astro.
Personal Experience
This will be short: I enjoyed every tiny bit!
Speakers were awesome and I learnt a ton.
I visited a lot of booths from different companies. All of them were friendly and welcoming. You can talk about anything related to Flutter/Android, and everyone was more than helpful.
Definitely recommend going to for after parties, if there are any, as you can hang out with all of them.
It is really hard to strike the right balance between going to talk to people and sitting at the speakers, but in the future I will try to talk to even more people than this time, because the biggest learning I got from people directly.
Overall, I do not regret attending any room or boot, every one of them will be highly useful in my development.
By the way, Berlin is actually a cool city to spend an extended weekend. I walked so much that I will need another vacation to regenerate! I do not mean it as a bad thing! (No, I am not from the US, but being on foot for 5 straight days without any pause is too much even for me)
Next year
Next year, the Nextapp Devcon conference will take the same place in October. Instead of Fluttercon and Droidcon, the conference will also include speakers from the Swift, React Native and AI communities. So, you can visit 5 conferences with the same tickets at the same time and take a look at whatever interests you.
I will try my best to attend once again, see you there!
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