How To Use Location Services In Your Flutter Application

Introduction

In this article, we are having a look at location services and how we can get the current position of the device in our Flutter application.

Location information can be used in various app scenarios. Maybe you want to show points of interest to the users or guide them towards a specific area. Either way, you will need access to the current location of the device. I’ll show you how to accomplish this task.

Setup

The first step is the installation of a package. There are many packages available at pub.dev, but I’ll demonstrate the steps with the most popular one: location. The setup process should be quite similar for all packages, the code however might be slightly different.

Not sure how to install a package? Check the following article for instructions.

How to install packages in your Flutter app

This short article shows how to add packages to a Flutter application so that you can use existing code and you don’t have to write everything yourself.

We also need to add capabilities to our app, so that the location request can be granted by the operating system and the user.

For Android, go to android/app/src/main/AndroidManifest.xml and add the capability

<uses-permission android:name="android.permission.ACCESS_FINE_LOCATION" />

or

<uses-permission android:name="android.permission.ACCESS_COARSE_LOCATION" />

to the file. The first one is more accurate but also requires more battery power. The entry should inside the <manifest> tag but not inside the <application> tag.

For iOS, go to ios/Runner/Info.plist and add the following code inside the <dict> node.

<key>NSLocationWhenInUseUsageDescription</key>
<true/>

Code

Here is a simple code example that initializes the plugin. You can call it for example in your initState() method of your main app state.

The following steps are performed:

• Check if device location services are enabled
• Check if usage permission for location services was granted
• Output the current position to the debug console

To get continouos information about position changes, you can add a listener.

location.onLocationChanged.listen((LocationData loc) {
	print("${loc.latitude} ${loc.longitude}");
});

Conclusion

In this article, I showed you how to set up and work with location data. The configuration can be a bit tricky at first, but the possibilities of location data are endless.

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