This article was updated for Flutter 3.3 on November 11, 2022.
A spinning progress indicator is fine when you only have to wait a second or two, but when a download takes much longer than that, users start to think that your app is broken.
If you can give them a sense of how much longer they have to wait, then they’ll be a little more patient.
In this article I’ll show you how to download a file and track the progress using a CircularProgressIndicator:
And once you’ve done that, it’s just as easy to swap it out with a LinearProgressIndicator:
Progress indicator widgets
You could certainly build your own custom progress indicator, but Flutter comes with two pre-built progress indicator widgets as demonstrated in the animated gifs I showed you above.
If you’d like to learn more about them, check out this short video:
