Hi @ankiimation,

I have found a way to launch the Flutter app when starting the app through the CarPlay interface when the app is not running on the foreground. The solution is based on this blog post: https://adapptor.com.au/blog/enhance-existing-apps-with-carplay where they solve it for ReactNative.

The main idea is to move the FlutterEngine creation to the AppDelegate, which will be run when the app is launched from anywhere (CarPlay or device). We can run the FlutterEngine in headless mode, so the dart code can run before the engine is attached to any actual view (which happens when launching the app first on the CarPlay). Then, on the SceneDelegate we reuse the engine and attach it to the actual view.

So the AppDelegate.swift will be like this:

import UIKit
import Flutter

let flutterEngine = FlutterEngine(name: "SharedEngine", project: nil, allowHeadlessExecution: true)

@UIApplicationMain
@objc class AppDelegate: FlutterAppDelegate {
  override func application( _ application: UIApplication,
                             didFinishLaunchingWithOptions launchOptions: [UIApplication.LaunchOptionsKey: Any]?) -> Bool {
    
    flutterEngine.run()
    GeneratedPluginRegistrant.register(with: flutterEngine)

    return super.application(application, didFinishLaunchingWithOptions: launchOptions);
    
  }
}

and the SceneDelegate.swift like this:

@available(iOS 13.0, *)
class SceneDelegate: UIResponder, UIWindowSceneDelegate {
    var window: UIWindow?

    func scene(_ scene: UIScene, willConnectTo session: UISceneSession, options connectionOptions: UIScene.ConnectionOptions) {

        guard let windowScene = scene as? UIWindowScene else { return }

        window = UIWindow(windowScene: windowScene)
        let controller = FlutterViewController.init(engine: flutterEngine, nibName: nil, bundle: nil)
        window?.rootViewController = controller
        window?.makeKeyAndVisible()
    }
}

With this we have the dart code running when the user launches the app from the CarPlay interface. However, some changes are needed on this plugin as well, as it will fail to update the rootInterface if it was null when launching the CarPlayScene. The solution here is to modify the FlutterCarplayPluginSceneDelegate so it doesn't set the interfaceController to nil if the rootTemplate is not set at startup. You have to replace the templateApplicationScene with the following snippet:

func templateApplicationScene(_ templateApplicationScene: CPTemplateApplicationScene,
                                didConnect interfaceController: CPInterfaceController) {
    FlutterCarPlaySceneDelegate.interfaceController = interfaceController
    
    SwiftFlutterCarplayPlugin.onCarplayConnectionChange(status: FCPConnectionTypes.connected)
    let rootTemplate = SwiftFlutterCarplayPlugin.rootTemplate
    
    if rootTemplate != nil {
      FlutterCarPlaySceneDelegate.interfaceController?.setRootTemplate(rootTemplate!, animated: SwiftFlutterCarplayPlugin.animated, completion: nil)
    }
  }

Then on your dart code, after setting the root template using FlutterCarplay.setRootTemplate you have to force the plugin to update the displayed template using: _flutterCarplay.forceUpdateRootTemplate();

With this you should be able to run the app when the user opens it on the CarPlay.

I have a branch with this changes here: snipd-mikel@a4a201c

@oguzhnatly Would it be possible to merge the changes onto the main repository? Only the ones on this file FlutterCarplayPluginSceneDelegate are actually needed to be included on the plugin. The rest of the changes could be part of the README. If you are interested I can work on a PR to have this ready.

CarPlay app required Flutter App open first? #12

Description

Metadata

Metadata

Assignees

Labels

Projects

Milestone

Relationships

Development

Issue actions