What is it?

Schildpad is a launcher app for Android built with Flutter. It aims to be robust but beautiful, just like a turtle.

You can find the archived repository on GitHub.

Why did I do it?

When I first started to learn programming, I wanted to build an Android launcher app. This would have been a huge project for me back then, so, you know, I never did it. For many years, I used OpenLauncher as launcher app and was kind of happy with it.

As my programming skills grew, at one point I felt like I should know how to write an app. I projected myself to be working on a cross platform app if any. So I researched cross platform frameworks and made a more or less arbitrary decision between Flutter and React Native. The fact that an Android launcher app is probably the worst use case for a cross platform framework made it more exciting for me.

What did I learn?

Everything required to build an app: storing data, routing, designing interface, testing on all levels including integration tests on an old phone. It was also the first time that I published an app to the app store (and I had something like 5 users).

Along the way, I learned a lot of details about Flutter, Android and how to do native interop with Protobuf.