Unlock Native Power in Flutter Part 1

Flutter's cross-platform magic hits a wall when you need native APIs. Here's how to bridge that gap without losing your mind.

Simform Engineering breaks down Flutter-native communication in this two-part series. Part 1 tackles Method Channels and Event Channels—the foundation for accessing platform-specific features like sensors, Bluetooth, and third-party SDKs that Flutter doesn't expose out of the box.

Key Takeaways

• Method Channels enable async calls between Dart and native code (Kotlin/Swift)
• Event Channels stream continuous data like accelerometer readings or GPS updates
• Platform channels limited by ~1MB buffer size and main thread blocking
• All data must serialize through StandardMessageCodec (Map, List, String, int, bool)
• Practical examples: fetching device model and streaming accelerometer data

Part 2 reveals how to embed entire native UI components directly into your Flutter app—plus the performance optimization tricks they don't tell you.