How To Use Location Services In Your Flutter Application

Introduction Link to heading

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 Link to heading

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 Link to heading

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

XML

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

or

XML

<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.

XML

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

Code Link to heading

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

❗

Warning

If location services are disabled, you will be asked to activate them.

❗

Warning

If usage permission has not been granted yet, you will be asked on Android. iOS will always ask on app launches. If you deny the usage, you won’t be prompted again. To change the setting, you’ll have to go to your phone settings and enable the permission for this app.

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

Dart

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

Conclusion Link to heading

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.

Quick prototyping with Flutter and a REST API Link to heading

In this article, I am going to show you how you can build a quick demo application that queries a web service and displays the results.

Create a new Flutter project in three different ways Link to heading

This short article shows how to create a new Flutter project, so you can start working on your app.

How to use the Flutter command-line interface Link to heading

In this article, we are looking at the Flutter CLI and its most common use cases for building, testing, deploying, and running Flutter applications.