pub.dev search finally works | Flutter

Some weeks ago I posted an article about pub.dev search by relevance which wasn’t working well enough.
Or with more adequate wording, it wasn’t working at all. It was practically impossible to find relevant packages by keyword.

There were a dozen (or dozens) opened issues on github with different examples. I opened one personally with keywords "http" and "animation".


And a miracle finally happened!
pub.dev’s search by relevance now works as expected (or at least much much better).

We can search for animation and find all the top animation packages.


Let’s congratulate ourselves!

Also, now we can see the number of downloads instead of the useless Popularity metric.
This one is a bit tricky. It is experimental. 😎

To enable it we should go to pub.dev/experimental and click the link near the Download count metrics label.


And then, we can see the package like this:


The official concern of the Flutter team about the number of downloads was that this number is affected by bots and automated builds. The concern is fair, especially for top packages like bloc, riverpod, dio, getit and so on.

But still, the number of downloads is so much better than the unclear popularity metric. I hope that it will finally be launched as part of the official pub.dev.

That’s all for today! Thanks for watching. Bye-bye.



#getx