What is legado_flutter?

Legado Flutter is a cross-platform rewrite of Legado, an open-source e-book and online reading application originally built for Android only. The goal of this rewrite is to expand the app to work on Android, iOS, Windows, macOS, and Linux, while also improving performance through a Rust-based core engine. The architecture splits the work between two layers. Flutter handles the visual interface, including the bookshelf, reader, search, and source management screens. Rust handles the heavy lifting underneath, organized into separate modules for networking, content parsing (formats like TXT and EPUB), storage via SQLite, and the book-source rule engine, which is the part that knows how to fetch and parse content from different online reading sites. These two layers communicate through flutter_rust_bridge, a tool that generates the bridging code between Flutter's Dart language and Rust. You would use this if you want to read online novels or e-books across multiple platforms using the Legado ecosystem of book sources and parsing rules, but want native performance and support beyond Android. The project is still in early development, the infrastructure is being built out and most major phases have not started yet. It requires Flutter 3.0 or later and Rust 2024 edition to build. This is a community-driven project and is not officially affiliated with the original Legado project.