This short guide is going to take you through my brief journey learning the basics of creating a Flutter App that can read and write to/from a NFC Tag.

The Commencement

Flutter is a very popular cross-platform app development framework built by Google. From humble beginnings, it now boasts near-native capabilities and performance for its universal apps across virtually all mobile and web devices. Ever since 2018, I’ve had a fascination for that promising framework, but always found this or that excuse to stick to React and never bother learning a bit of Dart code to take my development skills to the next level. However, as with anything worth doing in Life, you need the right trigger, a purpose for your journey; and that is precisely why I’ve decided to try out Flutter for the very specific and limited purpose of NFC coding.

The Pitch

Imagine you woke up an hour later than planned to catch a plane. Panic settles in as you sprint through your morning routine, trying to make sure you have all your documents ready and packed. But then, the drawer incident happens: there is a drawer full of random gadgets and crucial documents all jumbled together, where you rummage through in the hopes of finding your passport. It takes you the better part of 10 minutes, with anxiety and frustration settling in, for you to FINALLY find it amidst the pile of garbage, and you barely manage to catch the last train to the airport before it was too late.

Well, what if we could do without these frustrations? What if you could simply bring up your phone to that drawer, and be shown a clear list inventorying the full indexed content of that drawer? That would be a pretty easy problem to solve using a cheap NFC Tag placed on each drawer! Simply bring your phone or smartwatch to it and voila! Instant access to the forgotten archives.