Consider migrating to Pigeon for type safety with native platform

[flikkr]

Currently we are manually defining method channels to communicate with the underlying native platform for Android, iOS and web. This makes it easy to miss certain implementation details during development and can cause exceptions to occur due to the absence of type safety when using method channels.

To avoid these shortfalls and also accelerate development of this plugin, I would suggest to migrate from using method channels to using the Pigeon plugin developed by the Flutter team. This package can auto-generate the required platform communication code. This will also complement the current effort to migrate to the Places (new) API #77 since Google recently announced that the original Places API will be transitioning to Legacy status starting 1 March 2025.

Since this is an internal change, we can adopt the plugin incrementally starting with with the platform interface package. We can model after the video_player plugin which uses Pigeon. Let me know your thoughts.

[flikkr]

@matanshukry any thoughts on this? This would also remove the dependency on plugin_platform_interface

[matanshukry]

@flikkr As far as I can tell it's great, so I'm in favor of it.
Just note it does not remove the dependency on plugin_platform_interface.

The link you gave for video_player is deprecated/archived, but if you look at the correct one you'll see they use both the platform interface and the pigeon.

As far as I can tell the pigeon just makes it easier to use the platform interface, it doesn't replace it.

Video player package: https://github.com/flutter/packages/tree/main/packages/video_player
Video player android package, using platform interface and pigeon: https://github.com/flutter/packages/blob/main/packages/video_player/video_player_android/pubspec.yaml#L23C3-L23C34