Flutter Forward: Crafting Type-Safe Native Interfaces with Pigeon
Article Summary
Mercari's mobile team faced a tough choice: use an unmaintained plugin or build native calendar integration from scratch. They chose the harder path and discovered a better way.
Howie Zuo from Mercari Hallo's mobile team shares how they used Pigeon to build type-safe bridges between Flutter and native platforms. When existing plugins fell short on quality and maintenance, they built their own solution with compile-time safety guarantees.
Key Takeaways
- Pigeon auto-generates type-safe platform channel code for Flutter, Kotlin, and Swift
- Supports custom classes, nested types, enums, and async methods out of the box
- Eliminates manual string management across platforms and reduces runtime errors
- One Dart interface definition generates code for Android, iOS, and Flutter simultaneously
Critical Insight
Pigeon transforms risky, string-based platform channels into type-safe interfaces that catch errors at compile time instead of runtime.
