Flutter™️
The first step of the journey was choosing a framework that meets our requirements. We had very little experience with app development, so it was necessary to do some self-reliant research first and we ended up with two candidates: React Native and Flutter and we decided on the latter. The framework Flutter gained a lot of popularity among App-Developers in recent years. It allows us to develop our app cross-platform, so we receive a working Android APK as well as an iOS-Build with very few adjustments. Learning a new programming language may seem difficult at first sight - Flutter is written in Dart - but with its syntactical similarities to Java and JavaScript, we quickly got used to it. With Flutter, you can build the UI design and the backend logic in the same code base, so it’s easier to connect both elements and helped us to achieve an uninterrupted workflow.
Firebase ML Kit
Text recognition is one of the most essential features of the KISS-App. The mobile SDK Firebase ML Kit provides machine learning functionalities and allows us to recognize text instantly from captured photos and use it for further processing.
Android Studio and IntelliJ
Installing Flutter, setting up the IDE and the necessary emulators was trickier than expected: Each team member had to fight with some issues to get the tools running before we could start with the actual development. In the end, half of our group used Android Studio and the others went with IntelliJ but there aren’t any differences in functionality.