I just got a new Mac Mini with M1 CPUs. The first thing I did was install Chrome. The next thing I did was install Flutter.

Apple M1 chip comes in the MacBook Air, MacBook Pro 13″, and Mac Mini. The gaming experience can differ in these Macs as they pack different hardware other than the Apple M1 chip. But all three Macs will be able to run all the games that are given in the list. Games that are Compatible with M1 Macs. Is the 8GB memory M1 Mac Mini sufficient to develop apps using Android Studio & Flutter or do you need the 16GB M1 Mac Mini?Let's find out by simulating.

So I went to flutter.dev and downloaded the latest build. I extracted it, then created a new .zshrc and added flutter to my PATH. Then I ran flutter. It started downloading the Dart SDK, then threw this error:

A quick search on Google led me to this post. I installed Rosetta, then made Terminal.app open with Rosetta. For now I'll do this at the cost of performance, so that I don't have to hunt down which ones are compatible and which ones are not compatible with M1 yet.

And now that it's running fine, I realize there was indeed a note on installing Flutter on Macs with M1 processors:

Android Studio, Android Emulator, Visual Studio code are not ready for a stable build for M1, but it's being worked on. Things should get better in a few months at most. Until then there's always Rosetta.

Selecting an arm64 version of Android R did not work. So I had to use the emulator preview release.

It works mostly fine, except for WebView, says the documentation. When I tried it, it worked indeed. Then I launched my app, and clicked on the button to sign in. I'm using Firebase Auth, and what it does is, it makes you sign in... in a WebView. The WebView never showed up, and so I am unable to test my app in the emulator.

Can I run the Intel version of the emulator with Rosetta? No because the emulator uses virtualization, says the Android Studio team.

So I am stuck using my slower MacBook until they release a proper emulator.

Mac Mini M1 Review

Fast forward a few weeks, and it looks like new versions of the Emulator have been released. According to this post, it's even downloadable through the AVD Manager in Android Studio!

I followed the steps and downloaded the same image. However, the Emulator refused to run. The error was something like 'The Emulator was killed'. A quick search on Google reveals that quite a few users ran into the same issue a few days ago:

Mac Mini M1 Android Emulator Free

Mac Mini M1 Android Emulator

It looks like version 3 is broken, but version 2 isn't. The users show a way to manually replace that image with an old one, but I simply opted for downloading the separate Alpha Emulator from GitHub at https://github.com/google/android-emulator-m1-preview/releases/tag/0.3.

This version has WebViews, so I was able to run my Flutter app and sign in with Google. That will suffice for now!