How to schedule background tasks in Flutter?

Question

I have been looking a lot for this but haven't found any packages or a way to schedule background tasks in Flutter. Like in Android there is WorkManager,AlarmManager.

I know I can access those classes using MethodChannel, but I want something that works for iOS and Android both.

(Its very disappointing that a mobile framework doesn't have the ability to schedule background tasks).

Answer 1

What you want to do, i.e. cross-platform scheduling, is not a Flutter limitation. It is an iOS limitation. See this SO post which is referenced in this GitHub comment.

Answer 2

There is a Medium blogpost that explains how to do this.
However we thought it was way too complicated to set up so it just happens we created a plugin that aids you with this.

//Provide a top level function or static function.
//This function will be called by Android and will return the value you provided when you registered the task.
//See below
void callbackDispatcher() {
  Workmanager.executeTask((task) {
    print("Native echoed: $task");
    return Future.value(true);
  });
}

Workmanager.initialize(
    callbackDispatcher, //the top level function.
    isInDebugMode: true //If enabled it will post a notification whenever the job is running. Handy for debugging jobs
)

We support Android's Workmanager and iOS performFetch

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For now it only works for Android project, but we are looking at iOS soon.
I'll update this answer when it is available.

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We have iOS support now too. It is still early alpha, but give a go.
We wrote a complimentary Medium post too.

Answer 3

Would the Flutter Scheduler library help?

https://docs.flutter.io/flutter/scheduler/scheduler-library.html

Or maybe this plugin: https://github.com/flutter/plugins/tree/master/packages/android_alarm_manager