Updated November 3, 2023 for Flutter 3.13.
The biggest challenge for me when coming to Flutter was learning state management. People were saying Provider and Bloc and ScopedModel and Redux and MobX and…I had no idea what they were talking about. As time passed, the list of state management solutions continued to grow.
In my learning journey, I wrote articles about Stacked (here) and Provider (here and here) and Riverpod (here and here). I went through the Bloc pattern and BlocLibrary tutorials and looked into Cubit and GetX and watched videos about Redux and MobX and Command. But with each one there was always something that I couldn’t quite wrap my brain around. There were either too many options or too much magic was happening behind the scenes. My brain needed simple and understandable. It needed minimal.
That’s where this article comes in. I’m going to introduce a way to manage your app state that doesn’t use any of the third-party state management solutions. The only third-party package it uses is GetIt, not to manage state but to provide a reference to a plain Dart class where you’ll manage your own state. For rebuilding the UI on state changes, you’ll use Flutter’s own built-in ValueNotifier and ValueListenableBuilder classes.
