Android Studio, Flutter, and Firebase-Auth

Flutter is a new mobile application development framework, it is open source, and provides a common codebase for both Android and iOS development. I have a project that was originally started with Android Studio and Java, just for the Android platform. However, since I didn’t want to have to learn a completely new framework for iOS I decided to rewrite the app using Flutter.

The app requires authentication of users and the Java version used Firebase-Auth. My initial challenge with starting to build the app with Flutter was to write the code to sign up and login users using Firebase-Auth. This proved much more challenging than expected, after adding the Flutter Firebase-Auth dependency to the project it failed to build, giving many errors like “cannot find symbol import androidx.annotation.NonNull”.

Searching revealed a proposed solution,use the Android Studio “Migrate to AndoidX” feature. Unfortunately, this did not resolve the issue. In fact the migration process failed, reporting, “No Usages Found in the Project”.

After several hours of research and code changes it became apparent that the migration wizard was failing because there were no references in the project that needed migrating. When comparing a previous project where the migration had worked I found that there were a couple of options not setup in the “gradle.properties” file. The following entries were made and the project built correctly:

android.useAndroidX=true
android.enableJetifier=true

I hope this short blog helps others save a little time getting past this frustrating build issue.

Sid