Covid-19 Cases Tracker

This is a Flutter application for viewing the stats of the novel coronavirus (Covid-19) cases in India.

API Used

I have used Covid19India as the API to fetch the daily data related to the number of novel coronavirus cases in India. Covid19India provides a great amount of data in a properly structured json format. Additionally, they have engineered their open-source initiative to result into beautiful end results such as their website covid19india.org.

Packages used

1. http

This is the standard package offered by dart.dev to work with HTTP requests. This is used in the app to retrieve data using API.

2. url_launcher

This package consists of a complete set of functions from verifying a URL to launching it in a browser or in other supported applications. This supports web, SMS, email and phone schemes.

3. flutter_spinkit

Another useful package consisting of numerous customizable loaders that enhance the UX of the application.

4. flare_flutter

This package was used to utilize the animated vector character that has been used in the landing page. The character is from Rive which enables you to create your own character or use one from the vast public library.

Steps to run the application

The current app is a very basic version of just viewing the daily stats about the number concerning the thing encircling our lives since a year now. The release apk is there in the release section of the repository, you can check it out there. But if you want to go ahead and do something more creative, you are most welcome. In the meantime, follow the given steps to get this running on your own emulator:

1. Clone the repository

Clone the repository either by git clone https://github.com/fourpointfour/covid-cases-tracker or by directly downloading the zip file.

2. Opening main.dart

Use Android Studio, VS Code or IntelliJ, whatever you prefer, and open the main.dart file, this is where you need to start looking, if you are interested in working further on this. This is the file that is responsible for the launch of the application, so if you are doing your analysis, you now know where to begin.

3. Run the app

Now use whatever device you want to run this on, just launch the virtual device and run main.dart, you'll see everything if falling into place one by one. Good luck ;)

Issue while building the apk

A possible issue was encountered while building the apk, the build fails with an error message about the gradle. The issue was however due to some bug either in the gradle version or some incomplete installation on the system. However it was resolved after making a change in the /android/gradle/wrapper/gradle-wrapper.properties

Change distributionUrl=https\://services.gradle.org/distributions/gradle-5.6.2-all.zip to distributionUrl=https\://services.gradle.org/distributions/gradle-6.3-all.zip or some other stable or latest version number. Everything works fine after that.