How Building 7 Apps Solo Taught Me Flutter Better Than Any YouTube Course
Lessons from shipping, failing, and learning the hard way
I’ve watched my fair share of Flutter tutorials. Hours of “let’s build a to-do app” videos, endless blog posts, neatly edited courses. They all helped me start, but none of them actually prepared me for what it feels like to build something people might use.
That part? I only learned by shipping 7 apps solo. And let me tell you it was way messier, scarier, and more rewarding than any YouTube playlist.
Why Tutorials Don’t Cover Reality
Tutorials are safe. Everything works as expected, errors are predictable, the instructor already knows the answer. Real life isn’t like that.
In real projects, you fight weird bugs at 2 AM that no Stack Overflow thread seems to solve. You deal with users who don’t care about your clever code they just want the app to open fast and not crash. You juggle deadlines, analytics, and app store rejections, none of which are covered in a 10-minute video.
That chaos was my real classroom.
The First Few Apps: Pure Chaos
My early apps were disasters. One had a login flow so broken even I couldn’t get in half the time. Another looked great but had zero downloads outside of my friends.
But those failures taught me things no tutorial ever could:
Why you should never skip analytics setup
How performance matters more than pretty animations
Why building features nobody asked for is a waste of months
Every broken release was a painful but powerful teacher.
The Turning Point: Habitide
Habitide, my habit tracker, was different. It wasn’t perfect, but it stuck. Watching it cross a thousand users felt unreal. And in that moment, I realised something: the best way to learn Flutter wasn’t just about widgets or state management it was about seeing your code survive in the wild, under real users’ thumbs.
That experience rewired how I thought about development. Suddenly performance, user onboarding, and retention mattered more than clever architecture.
What Building 7 Apps Really Taught Me
Code is only half the battle. The other half is people.
Shipping fast beats building “perfect.”
Every failure carries a lesson you can’t learn in theory.
The real course is the app store, and every release is an exam.
Closing Thought
YouTube gave me a foundation, sure. But building and shipping apps gave me scars, lessons, and confidence no course could ever teach.
So here’s my question: what taught you more watching others build, or putting your own messy projects into the world?