For almost all of my flutter app’s API calls, I send them through PHP hosted on my server and return the data to flutter, and this has always worked well.
The reasons for this are:
- I don’t have to expose my API keys.
- Flexibility to make changes in my server and php, without always having to release a new app.
- Saving on data (single call to my server, which then collates the data from various API sources)
However with Google Places Autocomplete API, I’m unsure if this method is still a good way. It would mean repeated calls to my server, to fetch the API response (predictions) from Google, then return it Flutter to be displayed. This could cause it to be slow responding?
The only option I’ve come up with, is adding a delay to when textediting controller is updated, to when the data is fetched, which could reduce the total number of requests being made.
I’m really hoping someone has other suggestions I could try, to make the user experience not feel laggy.
NOTE: I use session tokens with my API requests.