Build Flavors and Environment Configuration

A production Flutter app rarely talks to a single backend. You need a dev build pointing at a local or staging API, a staging build for QA, and a hardened prod build for the store.

• Flavors are named build variants that can differ in app id, icon, name, and signing.
• Environment config is the data each flavor injects: base URLs, feature flags, API keys.

The goal: install dev, staging, and prod side-by-side on one device, each fully isolated and impossible to confuse.

A clean setup separates two concerns:

• Native flavors (Android productFlavors, iOS schemes/xcconfig) control the application identity: bundle id, display name, icon.
• Dart-define values control runtime configuration your Dart code reads: API URL, environment name, log level.

Native flavors let dev, staging, and prod coexist on the device with distinct ids like com.acme.app.dev. Dart-define keeps secrets and URLs out of source control and version-pinned at compile time.