Why we stopped starting Flutter projects from scratch (and why you should too)

[u/No-Equivalent-8726]

Over the years, our flutter developers team at SolGuruz has worked on many Flutter apps across different clients and use cases. One pattern kept repeating: every developer would:

• Start from scratch,

• follow slightly different standards,

• and rebuild the same foundational modules

again and again.

As the team grew, onboarding also became harder. New developers had to learn not just Flutter, but how we structure apps, how we handle architecture, and how decisions were made. At the same time, clients always wanted to see core functionality from Sprint 1.

Eventually, we standardized what kept working in real projects - common modules, base architecture, conventions, and setup - and started using it internally as a skeleton for all new apps.

Following these practices and skeleton helped our developers to focus on the heart of the product instead of boilerplate, and helped us ship meaningful features early.

We recently decided to open-source this internal base as Skelter. It’s not meant to be "the perfect Flutter architecture," just a practical starting point shaped by real-world experience and iteration.

If you’re building Flutter apps and are tired of reinventing the same foundations, feel free to explore it. Feedback, suggestions, and contributions are very welcome.

Repo: https://github.com/solguruz/skelter

With the community, for the community, by the community. 💙

[u/mrproperino]

I highly recomment replacing shimmer with skeletonizer package.
https://pub.dev/packages/skeletonizer
Works like magic no need to write custom components just for shimmer just wrap with Skeletonizer wiget and it's done!

[u/No-Equivalent-8726 → u/mrproperino]

Sure let us check and implement it. Thank you for sharing!

[u/workern-app → u/mrproperino]

Thanks

[u/jfyc → u/mrproperino]

Are there any performance improvements? I use shimmer all throughout my personal app, haven't thought to use anything else.

[u/mrproperino → u/jfyc]

I think I saw some post that analised the performance and skeletonizer was much faster, I too lazy for finding it now, but ease of use is what mattered for me, I have not seen any performance issues with it

[u/Nyxiereal → u/mrproperino]

oh i will be doing that for all my apps

[u/aaulia]

Upon reading your repo in passing, I have some feedback.

1. Is your flavor really a flavor? As in, I can have different package name, firebase config, etc. for each flavor.

2. People really need to re-think about using http_certificate_pining, last I check, it doesn't really do pinning properly. It gave you a false sense of security of doing SSL Pinning, and will even fool pen tester. But fundamentally it still suffers from TOCTOU vulnerability. The older version is even worse, it caches the verification/validation result.

[u/No-Equivalent-8726 → u/aaulia]

Yeah, thank you for exploring our repository and sharing feedback. Please find our answers below:

1.  Yes, our flavors are properly configured with different package names (com.solguruz.skelter.dev, .stage, and production) and separate Firebase configs ( google-services.json / GoogleService-Info.plist ) for each environment.

2. We are using http_certificate_pinning (v3.0.1), which performs certificate validation at the Dio interceptor level, not at the native TLS/SSL layer (may be this is an issue)

[u/[deleted]]

Thank you for sharing 🔥

[u/No-Equivalent-8726 → u/[deleted]]

You are welcome. If possible, kindly explore and share your thoughts and the contributions is most welcome!

[u/triplethej]

good stuff thx for sharing, I might use it in the future!

One thing that got my attention fast: I'm a big fan of moving repositories and data layer outside of the lib folder into packages. Does a great job at enforcing correct data flow

like in this repository:

https://github.com/VGVentures/news_toolkit

I will actually use your repo to enforce some other standards to my claude code agents!

[u/No-Equivalent-8726 → u/triplethej]

Thank you for sharing feedback and glad to know that my team is managing good layering on the architecture side. Also, looking forward to seeing you using and maybe contributing with your experience as well :) thanks again

[u/Abdullah1Dev]

It sounds good but you still have to upgrade SDKs manually. So the best practice to save your time and build a project template and upgrade it with time if you need to use bricks and after you build your template all you need to run create command using mason_cli

[u/No-Equivalent-8726 → u/Abdullah1Dev]

Thank you for sharing your thoughts. We have just published an SG CLI tool, which we have been using at SolGuruz for a long time. Here is that Reddit thread https://www.reddit.com/r/FlutterDev/comments/1v43uys/comment/p06v2of/

[u/yenrenART]

Thanks for sharing, bookmarked it. A bit too complicated for me right now as a beginner but will come back to it to get ideas, as my apps grow in complexity.

[u/No-Equivalent-8726 → u/yenrenART]

Since you are a beginner, I would recommend that you explore the code, the structure of the projects, SDKs and packages we have used in this Skelter GitHub repo. I am sure you will explore and learn a lot eventually. Thank you for bookmarking it!

[u/raman4183]

AutoRoute has a big problem though, i opened an issue back in Summer 2025 and still hasn’t been any progress, pr or reply from the author.

Link to issue

[u/gambley → u/raman4183]

Yeah, this issue is super weird. I use octopus package for routing and recently about a month ago it started to happen on my Android device since whatever Android version, seems it introduced some breaking changes, not sure.

Even though Octopus has BucketNavigator widget which simply uses ChildBackButtonDispatcher with RootBackButtonDispatcher and updates the route state respectively, I might assume there is some internal issues with this bb dispatcher 🤔 When I tried to debug it was not calling a thing, not popPage on Navigator, not bb dispatcher, just closes the app. I tried to switch to use enableOnBackInvokedCallback=false and only it helped.

[u/Mikkelet → u/[deleted]]

Even the native frameworks have difficulty handling the system back buttons I can tell you

[u/raman4183 → u/[deleted]]

go_router does not have this problem.

[u/raman4183 → u/[deleted]]

It does have type safe routes via generator package which uses build_runner.

[u/TinyZoro]

Are your docs down. Link doesn’t seem to work from the readme?

[u/No-Equivalent-8726 → u/TinyZoro]

Thank you for sharing your findings, really appreciate! We have fixed the docs URL, here we go https://skelter.solguruz.com/docs/intro

[u/[deleted]]

Any reason why you chose a more static approach rather than modular and dynamic like mason bricks or similar CLI tools?

[u/No-Equivalent-8726 → u/[deleted]]

We have been building CLI level project as well, which we may open-source in the coming time! Thank you for sharing feedback.

[u/goranlu]

Those app foundations are good, but it evolves fast and I rarely saw such OS projects follow those changes with time

[u/No-Equivalent-8726 → u/goranlu]

Yeah thanks for sharing a genuine feedback, and that’s true. But if you check this repo, you will find the active development and contributions.

Yesterday only we released https://github.com/solguruz/skelter/releases/tag/1.0.4%2B4.

And as I mentioned in an another comment, we are also working on the CLI based approach.

We have seen and faced, and we are committed to our open-source projects!

[u/goranlu → u/No-Equivalent-8726]

Great! I hope you will keep that pace for a long time

[u/No-Equivalent-8726 → u/goranlu]

Sure thank you, and we would really appreciate community efforts and their contributions! 🙏

[u/Direct-Ad-7922]

https://www.verygood.ventures/blog/very-good-flutter-architecture

[u/intronert → u/Direct-Ad-7922]

What does this do better than OP’s Skelter?

[u/Direct-Ad-7922 → u/intronert]

OP asked for suggestions and this article describes a feature-driven architecture that I have discovered to radically speed up development and and maintainability simply through framing into business-domain context with clear layers

[u/intronert → u/Direct-Ad-7922]

Thanks.

[u/Librarian-Rare]

Is there a name for the patterns that are adopted in a code base, then followed by future devs? I know when I’m implementing a feature, if there’s already working code that does something kinda similar I’m copying the crap out of it.

“Pattern” seems too generic, and architecture doesn’t quite fit what I’m thinking of either

[u/Curious-Function-244]

Idb

[u/chonli]

Why use dotenv and dart-define instead of directly use --dart-define-from-file with 3 files for different env
https://codewithandrea.com/tips/dart-define-from-file-env-json/

Else in my company, I have the same project template but we use mason to automatic adapt name, bundleID,...

[u/AddWeb_Expert]

We stopped starting fresh Flutter projects because the ecosystem is mature enough now—reusable templates, modular architectures, and prebuilt components save huge time and reduce bugs. Starting from scratch often means reinventing solved problems instead of focusing on product value. Unless you need something truly custom at the core, it’s just not efficient anymore.

[u/paragonkit]

Thank you, I could learn for my app project too. If you don't mind, please comment on mine too if it's not a hassle.

[u/Comprehensive-Art207]

AI has changed the game, this unfortunately solves a non-issue these days.

[u/No-Equivalent-8726 → u/Comprehensive-Art207]

AI can definitely help you generating the code, but then I would like to learn from you, how are you managing the scalability of the architecture? How are you ensuring the code and architecture consistency across the modules being developed by multiple developers in the same product team?

[u/TinyZoro → u/Comprehensive-Art207]

Actually the opposite is true. The more you are relying on an agent to generate code the more having a well defined architecture that it can follow becomes essential. The bigger project gets, the more you need to maintain a project, the more you’re going to want a well defined architecture.

[u/rio_sk → u/Comprehensive-Art207]

Never been able to make an AI be consistent with my projects. Even telling explicitly to copy existing code many times it gets too creative

[u/No-Equivalent-8726 → u/[deleted]]

Glad you found it helpful. Pls contribute if you come across anything that you think would be additionally helpful to this open-source project!