Building a platform-specific UI

In a Flutter application, there are two primary ways to access the platform that the application is running on: statically (using platform flags) or dynamically (using the TargetPlatform object from BuildContext). The platform can be detected statically using the list of platform flags provided by the Flutter framework, as detailed here:

• isLinux
• isMacOS
• isWindows
• isAndroid
• isIOS
• isFuschia

Each name implies the platform in which the application is executing. The tradeoff of using these flags is that they cannot be used to dynamically switch the styles for a platform. To do so, we turn to TargetPlatform defined on context. Before we dive into using MaterialApp to build our Settings application, let’s demonstrate how to access the platform dynamically.

We can access the target platform information directly from BuildContext by using Theme.of(context).platform. Open the app.dart file and add the following code...