Adaptive and responsive design in Flutter
One of Flutter's primary goals is to create a framework that allows you to develop apps from a single codebase that look and feel great on any platform.
This means that your app might appear on screens of many different sizes, from a watch, to a foldable phone with two screens, to a high definition monitor. And your input device might be a physical or virtual keyboard, a mouse, a touchscreen, or any number of other devices.
Two terms that describe these design concepts are
adaptive
and
responsive
. Ideally, you'd want your app to be
both
but what, exactly, does this mean?
An easy way to think about it is that responsive design is about fitting the UI
into
the space and adaptive design is about the UI being
usable
in the space.
So, a responsive app adjusts the placement of design elements to
fit
the available space. And an adaptive app selects the appropriate layout and input devices to be usable
in
the available space. For example, should a tablet UI use bottom navigation or side-panel navigation?
This section covers various aspects of adaptive and responsive design:
