What's the difference between flutter_local_notifications and awesome_notifications packages for notification?

After reading through docs and repository I understood, that historically awesome_notifications had Push-notification feature built-in and no firebase_messaging was needed. But that raised issues as people used both awesome_notifications and firebase_messaging, which led to problems when used in conjunction.

So the author of awesome_notifications removed Push-notification and kept it local.

Which leads to a question: if awesome_notifications is now a plugin for local notifications, what does it have now that flutter_local_notifications doesn't have?

So why would we need awesome_notifications plugin?

CodePudding user response：

My understanding is that awesome_notifications just adds some bells and whistles on flutter_local_notifications which is more minimalist. If you want to do the customization yourself use local_notifications, if you want something with more style out of the box use awesome_notifications.

CodePudding user response：

I've managed to reach the creator of awesome_notifications plugin and he answered on this question. To let others know here's his answer:

The philosophy behind awesome and flutter_local are totally opposed. Flutter_local just translates the native functions to Flutter, and you're going to need to do everything on your own. But there are some things that you’re not able to do only using dart, and you're going to struggle with them, such as badge management, interception of notification events, etc.

Awesome works by creating a middleware between native and flutter, handling the native complexity as much as possible to let the notification implementation in your app be as transparent as possible. It's not only about differences between Android and iOS, but also between Android distributions.

And awesome_notifications has a lot more features than flutter_local and covers a lot more services surrounding notifications, such as schedules and badge management.

They are not the same; in fact, they are very different.