I built a real-time messaging + multiplayer games app in Flutter. Here's what surprised me
I've been building a social/messaging app called Riv with Flutter, and the biggest surprise wasn't actually building the UI.
It was getting all the different real-time pieces to behave like one system.
The app has real-time messaging, presence indicators, group chats, notifications, and multiplayer games. That meant I had to deal with things like state synchronization, reconnects, message delivery, game state, background behavior and keeping the UI responsive while everything was changing underneath it.
The interesting part was that problems that look completely unrelated at first often turned out to be the same underlying problem: what should the client consider authoritative, and what should happen when the client is temporarily out of sync?
I'm still refining the architecture, but the app is now live.
I'm posting this mainly because I'd be interested in hearing how other Flutter developers would approach the architecture differently.
If anyone is interested, I can also break down how I handled the real-time messaging/game state separation.