Distributing Flutter with Fabric to beta testers

Question

My company is trying out Flutter to create mobile applications and I'm currently in the process of trying to distribute both iOS and Android beta builds through Fabric.

The flutter plugin repo doesn't have any Fabric plugins and I can't seem to find any guides at the flutter home page nor elsewhere online on how to achieve this.

I had planned to focus first on iOS since I'm an iOS developer and figure android out later and use fastlane-match to manage my codesigning on iOS. What I've come up with so far is that I'm gonna try to create post-build-scripts discussed in this fabric guide and thus upload my builds manually after flutter builds and creates an IPA file. I'd say this is not optimal since it differs from the rest of our build setup, as in the fabric kit is not directly embedded in to our iOS project.

So I'm wondering if anybody has any experience in distributing flutter apps with Fabric and if you had any tips on how to achieve this, preferably with Fabric integrated into my iOS and android project respectively.

Edit: For anybody interested in the solution, I ended up adding the Fabric and Crashlytics cocoapod into the generated cocoapod file by flutter and installing them via pod install. I'm not sure if that cocoapod file will get overwritten in the future as my experience with Flutter is quite limited.

After that I was able to import both Fabric and Crashlytics into my AppDelegate and Initializing the Fabric kit from there just like in a normal iOS project, as well as adding the runscript phase and plist entries as recommended by the fabric iOS install guide.

I also set the project up to use manual code signing and managed the codesigning with fastlane match.

After that I created a fastlane script that uploads to crashyltics. The build script I ended up with is:

flutter build ios --release --no-codesign
cd ios
fastlane ios beta

where ios references to my platform and beta is the name of the lane that exectues the fabric upload. The beta lane first builds with gym (to sign the IPA file) and then that signed IPA file is uploaded to crashlytics.

Answer 1

Fabric is now integrated to Firebase. It was deprecated after March 31, 2020. With this, you can now refer to Firebase App Distribution as an official documentation.

Flutter also has a bunch of documentation regarding distribution of Flutter applications to beta testers.

Continuous delivery with Flutter

Follow continuous delivery best practices with Flutter to make sure your application is delivered to your beta testers and validated on a frequent basis without resorting to manual workflows.

You can also check this blog for some useful tips and more information on Deploying Flutter apps to Firebase App Distribution using Fastlane:

Deploying Flutter app to Firebase App Distribution using Fastlane

In this article, I will be showing how to set up and deploy your Flutter app to Firebase App Distribution with the help of fastlane.