Flutter Development on the M1 Mac — Does it work?

The iOS and Android simulators running side by side on the M1 Mac

This post is aimed at people who are contemplating buying a new Mac specifically for flutter development and are confused whether they should go for the Intel version vs the M1 one.

To answer the question in the title — Yes it does, atleast it did for me with the app I was working with.

My decision was based on a reasoning that ultimately Apple would be moving forward with their chip and would make it de-facto for all their machines, so it is better to start off with it now.

Just to give you a list of what works

1. Android Studio works — I didn’t do full fledged development on this machine yet as I am working on a different machine for development.
2. iOS simulator works as was expected
3. Connection to physical devices worked for both iOS and Android.
4. Android simulator — It doesn’t work out of the box and for the time being the preview worked for me. https://github.com/google/android-emulator-m1-preview

It was exciting to see the xcode build getting finished in under a minute and subsequent builds were under 40 seconds, whereas on an 5 year old i7 Mac it was around 5 minutes for the first build and subsequent builds where around 1.5–2 minutes. These results are for the app I was working on.

I am for the time being satisfied with the M1 Mac, especially because I don’t use it as a primary machine and as support for M1 grows the experience is only going to get better.