Flutter and Android on the TV

I wrote recently about installing TV HeadEnd on a Raspberry PI and I was wondering what sort of things I could do with it for fun. One of the problems we have in the house is that we use Amazon Fire TV Sticks or ChromeCast dongles and in order to watch normal broadcast TV, we have to either download an App for the station - such as BBC IPlayer, or Channel 4, then search for the program before being able to watch it. Even with IPlayer, watching live TV is at least 5 clicks away, each with a submenu - it’s a painful experience. The alternative is to switch TV inputs and watch the TV through my new fancy aerial (admittedly this is the simpler approach, but I wasn’t after simple, I wanted utility and function).

What I wanted was a an App that could live on the Fire TV stick which when launched simply showed me a list of channels and allowed me to click on channel to fire up a stream. A very simple UI would work, and it’d mean that I don’t have to change TV inputs at all.

I’ve been interested in Flutter and Dart for a while, and I’ve been itching to try writing up something useful, so this would be a perfect project to try it in. The TV HeadEnd server has an API, albeit lacking in documentation, but what is available is workable. I know there is already an app for the Fire TV stick that allows you watch TV from the TVHeadEnd server, and it’s actually quite good but it still requires far too many clicks to get what you want.

I managed to develop the app in two afternoons, and using the ADK I could test it quite happily with and Android TV emulator. It turns out though that Flutter doesn’t yet work with a D-PAD interface, and in order to use a remote control you have set up a RawKeyboardListener and really fight with the FocusNode. This was sometimes painful, especially when using a GridView of n elements and having no onTap methods available since the raw widgets didn’t realised they were being tapped. To resolve this, I ended up with large switch statements inside the RawKeyboardListner to work out which widget is selected and then calling the right method when the user clicks the centre button. This might not have been the best solution, but it was the one that I managed to get to work.

After much fumbling and reverting to many mailing list posts, and issues on Github, I got the thing up and running, only to be rejected by the Amazon App store - they claim it crashes on startup, but don’t provide any logs. I’ve debugged and debugged on two of my FireTV sticks, and I can’t seem to get it to fail. I’m putting the project to one side for now until flutter gets better support for Android TV and other remote control interfaces, and maybe I’ll try again soon.

For what it’s worth, Flutter is Awesome! I can wholeheartedly say that I’d happily try writing my next app project in it.
Development was a breeze, the documentation was fantastic and there are lots of developers writing about it and publishing interesting tips.

I don’t blame Flutter and the team for the app not working out the of the box with remote control based interfaces. I expect support will come soon.

In the mean time, I might build a standard Android mobile app with Chromecast support in order to solve my use-case. I can however run the app quite nicely when I publish it directly to my FireTV stick, so theres that.

Edit: I recently found https://pub.dev/packages/focusnode_widgets and hope to try re-implementing the UI with that to see if it makes a difference.