Provider Is Not State

All sorts of frameworks listed on the Flutter State Solutions page. But, most of them are DI frameworks and not state management. Provider is just a DI framework just like GetIt, Getx, MobX, Riverpod, and all the rest of them. Let’s emphatically find out what a state management system is in Flutter.

Background

I am going to use the Provider DI framework as an example, but it applies to all DI frameworks. Here, let’s look at the typical DI architecture using the Provider example:

The only part that is state is inducing state change and reporting state change. The management is the reporting state part of app architecture! If I do not report state change to the model, do I have state management?

Or to ask another way, if I only use ChangeNotifier in a counter model do I have state management. Maybe not fully but it’s a start as via the listener we are reporting the state somewhere.

Yes, any DI framework has a state inducement part. But, that is not state management.

The only framework that has beginning state management and DI in the same framework is Redux. And I state that as Redux by itself attempts to…