I just got a new Mac Mini with M1 CPUs. The first thing I did was install Chrome. The next thing I did was install Flutter.
Is the 8GB memory M1 Mac Mini sufficient to develop apps using Android Studio & Flutter or do you need the 16GB M1 Mac Mini?Let's find out by simulating. Now They work on M1 Macbook Air!Homebrew is not a virtualization 😅 Other three softwares are!Tell me what you think after watching this video.Macbook Air Mo.
So I went to flutter.dev and downloaded the latest build. I extracted it, then created a new .zshrc and added flutter to my PATH. Then I ran flutter. It started downloading the Dart SDK, then threw this error:
A quick search on Google led me to this post. I installed Rosetta, then made Terminal.app open with Rosetta. For now I'll do this at the cost of performance, so that I don't have to hunt down which ones are compatible and which ones are not compatible with M1 yet.
Mac Mini M1 16gb
And now that it's running fine, I realize there was indeed a note on installing Flutter on Macs with M1 processors:
Android Studio, Android Emulator, Visual Studio code are not ready for a stable build for M1, but it's being worked on. Things should get better in a few months at most. Until then there's always Rosetta.
Selecting an arm64 version of Android R did not work. So I had to use the emulator preview release.
It works mostly fine, except for WebView, says the documentation. When I tried it, it worked indeed. Then I launched my app, and clicked on the button to sign in. I'm using Firebase Auth, and what it does is, it makes you sign in... in a WebView. The WebView never showed up, and so I am unable to test my app in the emulator.
Can I run the Intel version of the emulator with Rosetta? No because the emulator uses virtualization, says the Android Studio team.
So I am stuck using my slower MacBook until they release a proper emulator.
Mac Mini M1 Ports
Fast forward a few weeks, and it looks like new versions of the Emulator have been released. According to this post, it's even downloadable through the AVD Manager in Android Studio!
Android Studio M1
I followed the steps and downloaded the same image. However, the Emulator refused to run. The error was something like 'The Emulator was killed'. A quick search on Google reveals that quite a few users ran into the same issue a few days ago:
It looks like version 3 is broken, but version 2 isn't. The users show a way to manually replace that image with an old one, but I simply opted for downloading the separate Alpha Emulator from GitHub at https://github.com/google/android-emulator-m1-preview/releases/tag/0.3.
Mac Mini M1 Android Emulator Download
This version has WebViews, so I was able to run my Flutter app and sign in with Google. That will suffice for now!