Flutter and Android on the TV - An Update

If you read my previous post on developing an Android TV app using Flutter, you’d have noticed that I was a little frustrated about having to rewrite large portions of the user interface by wrapping a RawKeyboardListener in order to support the remote control D-PAD.

I stumbled across a post ¹ by Mushthaq Mohammed discussing using Flutter on Android TV and in the article, I found this little snippet:

return Shortcuts(
      shortcuts: <LogicalKeySet, Intent>{
        LogicalKeySet(LogicalKeyboardKey.select): ActivateIntent(),
      },
      child: MaterialApp(
      ...
);

I quickly wrapped an older version of my app (pre RawKeyboardListener extensions) with this snippet, and lo-and-behold, it works perfectly with the D-PAD. At least with the emulator. I’m going to try this on a real device later this evening. Fingers Crossed!

1. https://medium.com/@pcmushthaq/adding-android-tv-support-to-your-flutter-app-dcc5c1196231 ↩