Building a Motivational Quote App in One Weekend with Flutter

In today’s post I wanted to speak about my recent experience using Flutter, a mobile native framework that uses Dart to build native apps. It’s been such a fun and positive learning experience since I started a couple years back (on & off) that I wanted to try and answer the following question:

Could you build a motivational quote app in just one weekend using the technology?

Read on to find out 👀

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Why a Motivational Quote App?

Why a motivational quote app you might ask?

Honestly, I just really love them. I’ve been using “Motivation” for a while now and thought — why not take a crack at my own just to keep up to date with the latest version of Flutter?

I found the following quote API at API Ninjas and that sold things for me 👌

To keep the scope within reason for a weekend I kept the UI simple, just like in Motivation, and I only focused on the iPhone. I’m also locked into the Apple ecosystem with no Android devices at home, so it made sense to stick to iOS only.

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Saturday: Setup & Integration

The initial kickoff was easy - integrating with the API was straightforward and the free tier is perfect for personal projects. The limit is quite generous and refreshes monthly.

For a personal motivation app that’s perfect, but I guess it depends on how many quotes you want and how you batch the requests 🤔

After having to update my local config, relearn the new Flutter changes, and get the API integrated, it was time to call it quits for Saturday.

Honestly, not a lot was visibly done. It resulted in a lot of waiting around and setup work 😅

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Sunday: UI & Notifications

Sunday was about wrapping things up:

• Building a simple UI
• Batch calling requests from API Ninjas
• Getting local notifications working

This was all thanks to the available libraries that exist to kickstart development. Yes, there’s some setup for notifications across each platform (I used flutter_local_notifications), but it’s much less than having to learn and build for each platform separately.

The app was very rudimentary, but again, the goal of the experiment was simple:

Could you build a motivational quote app in just one weekend using Flutter?

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The Result

The answer is yes — it’s absolutely possible!

All you need is:

• An API to provide quotes
• Or… of course… you could always build a quick one and host it on CapRover 😉

Honestly, I’ve been such a fan of the technology and I love seeing how powerful it is. The ability to create a rudimentary app in just one weekend that can be deployed across iOS, Android, and Web is amazing.

Until next time, happy hacking!