Question

Have you ever wanted to execute Dart code in the background—even if your app wasn’t the currently active app? Perhaps you wanted to implement a process that watches the time, or that catches camera movement. In Flutter, you can execute Dart code in the background.

The mechanism for this feature involves setting up an isolate. Isolates are Dart’s model for multithreading, though an isolate differs from a conventional thread in that it doesn’t share memory with the main program. You’ll set up your isolate for background execution using callbacks and a callback dispatcher.

For more information and a geofencing example that uses background execution of Dart code, see Executing Dart in the Background with Flutter Plugins and Geofencing, an article in the Flutter Publication on Medium. At the end of this article, you’ll find links to example code, and relevant documentation for Dart, iOS, and Android.