Flutter - An app to get movie ratings on-demand
Flutter is an open source android app completely written in Kotlin. The idea behind Flutter comes from a necessity. I would spend a lot of time on Netflix just find a good movie to watch. It was difficult to find a good movie because Netflix would show its own ratings which are not at all reliable and more often than not I would end up watching a bad movie. I wanted something which would show me the IMDb rating of the movie on Netflix. I didn’t find anything that would work on Android so I thought of writing my own app and named it Flutter.
What’s Flutter?
Flutter uses Android’s accessibility services to read the titles of the movies and TV shows from Netflix app. Once the title is obtained, the app would send a query to the open movie database to get the movie ratings and show it in floating window over the app.
Open Source
Flutter was closed source during its inception and for a few versions. I realized that there was nothing worth to be kept hidden as I made the first working version in couple of days so I thought anyone else could also do the same. So I decided to make it open source and changed some build configurations in order to hide my API key, added flavors to strip Crashlytics and Fabric events from the open source version. It’s available on Github - MovieRatings.
Kotlin
Flutter is my first app that I have written in Kotlin. I chose to go with Kotlin as Google announced that they have started supporting it and I thought this would be a good learning exercise. Initially, the code seemed a lot like Java and once I completed Kotlin koans, I made some changes to make it more Kotlin-y. I experienced that it was similar experience when I was starting with Python. There are a lot of ways to write a code, but there are some pythonic ways to do it. It’s similar with Kotlin. I started improving the code and using some functionality such as map, sortBy, etc. There were also some syntax issues with RxKotlin initially, but I got over them. I wouldn’t say that the code is a good example of Kotlin, but I’m making progress and change stuff when I learn more about it. Eg. I started using sealed classes for UI states which seem to be a good usecase.
Accessibility Services
Android offers a wide range of accessibility services that developers can leverage to create innovative apps and also offer some features to people with disabilities. Flutter uses accessibility services to get window state changed and window content changed for the supported apps. Once it receives window content changed event, it looks for nodes with specific view id which Netflix uses to show the title of the movie.
Open Movie Database
OMDb is a great API to get information and ratings of the movies. It’s free with limited usage and operates on Patreon donations. It doesn’t have as much information as TMDb or TVDb but it gets the job done. It offers APIs to search for movies based on a title or search query, get movie info based on IMDb ID.
Search and Collections
Initially, I didn’t have any plans of adding features to search for movies, get more information and add them to collections. As time passed and I needed some pet project to get better at Kotlin, I decided to add more features to Flutter. Now, I actively develop it, add new features and also take user requests.
Contribution
Flutter is open for contribution but hasn’t received any. Here’s the issues page and the project page. Feel free to add feature requests, issues, or have a look if you’re interested in contributing.