Preview Locally

Once you have created a release, you can preview your release on an Android device, Android emulator, or iOS device using the shorebird preview command.

shorebird preview

This will download the release artifacts for the selected app release version, install the app on the selected device, and start the application.

Tip

shorebird preview can be used on any computer that is configured for Flutter development, not just the computer that was used to create the release. This is useful for verifying releases that were created on a CI/CD server.

Hybrid apps

Because Flutter modules (.aars and .xcframeworks, created with shorebird release aar and shorebird release ios-framework, respectively) are embedded in apps that Shorebird does not know about, shorebird preview does not support them.

To test these releases, you can use your normal development flow with the artifacts that Shorebird creates. For example, if you launch your app normally from Xcode or Android Studio with a Release configuration, you will see Shorebird logs in its output. If you have published a patch, it should be downloaded on the first run of your app and visible on subsequent runs.