Flutter State Management

Start with ownership and lifetime, then choose mechanics.

Inspect

Identify which state is ephemeral UI state, feature state, shared application state, cached server data, or persisted data. Determine who creates, mutates, observes, and disposes it.

Rules

• Keep state as local as its consumers allow.
• Maintain a single source of truth and derive secondary values instead of synchronizing copies.
• Make state transitions explicit and keep side effects outside widget build methods.
• Preserve an established package and its conventions when they are functioning.
• For a new project, choose based on complexity, team familiarity, testability, code generation tolerance, and lifecycle needs—not popularity alone.
• Expose immutable state or read-only views of mutable collections.
• Model loading, empty, success, and failure states deliberately where the UI distinguishes them.
• Avoid broad subscriptions that rebuild unrelated subtrees.