Flutter Desktop: Cannot find device on MacOS Catalina

Question

I want to activate with flutter config --enable-macos-desktop, after execution the value is set to true but (Unavailable).

The problem is that I also can not see my device in flutter devices. So my question is do you know why it is Unavailable and if it is possible to write currently desktop apps for macOS?

Solution 1

This is how you can verify what is available and set your environment properly:

$ flutter config
....
.... 
Settings:
  enable-macos-desktop: true (Unavailable)

$ flutter channel stable
$ flutter devices

No devices detected.

Now if you will change it to master

$ flutter channel master
$ flutter devices

Downloading Dart SDK from Flutter engine aaf9e79f1d29e128ad5d3beaad1bf4dd0074c470...
  % Total    % Received % Xferd  Average Speed   Time    Time     Time  Current
                                 Dload  Upload   Total   Spent    Left  Speed
100  221M  100  221M    0     0  27.2M      0  0:00:08  0:00:08 --:--:-- 27.7M
Building flutter tool...
Downloading package sky_engine...                                   0.5s
Downloading flutter_patched_sdk tools...                            1.0s
Downloading flutter_patched_sdk_product tools...                    0.8s
Downloading darwin-x64 tools...                                     1.6s
Downloading darwin-x64/font-subset tools...                         0.6s
1 connected device:

macOS • macOS • darwin-x64 • Mac OS X 10.15.4 19E287

$ flutter devices                                                                                                                                
1 connected device:

macOS • macOS • darwin-x64 • Mac OS X 10.15.4 19E287

$ flutter config

....
....
Settings:
  enable-macos-desktop: true

Solution 2

I found the problem. To make some settings work you have to be on a specific flutter channel. I was on the dev channel of flutter and therefore the configurations did not work.

I changed now to flutter master and it worked well.

https://github.com/flutter/flutter/wiki/Flutter-build-release-channels

Solution 3

This is how you can verify what is available and set your environment properly:

$ flutter channel stable
$ flutter devices

No devices detected.

Now if you will change it to master

$ flutter channel master
$ flutter devices

Downloading Dart SDK from Flutter engine aaf9e79f1d29e128ad5d3beaad1bf4dd0074c470...
  % Total    % Received % Xferd  Average Speed   Time    Time     Time  Current
                                 Dload  Upload   Total   Spent    Left  Speed
100  221M  100  221M    0     0  27.2M      0  0:00:08  0:00:08 --:--:-- 27.7M
Building flutter tool...
Downloading package sky_engine...                                   0.5s
Downloading flutter_patched_sdk tools...                            1.0s
Downloading flutter_patched_sdk_product tools...                    0.8s
Downloading darwin-x64 tools...                                     1.6s
Downloading darwin-x64/font-subset tools...                         0.6s
1 connected device:

macOS • macOS • darwin-x64 • Mac OS X 10.15.4 19E287

$ flutter devices                                                                                                                                
1 connected device:

macOS • macOS • darwin-x64 • Mac OS X 10.15.4 19E287

$ flutter config

....
....
Settings:
  enable-macos-desktop: true