DX Radio started as a 2023 goal: ship a real Flutter app with Google AdMob banner ads. I love listening to the radio, so I built one for Brunei’s stations. It has since grown into a production app on the Google Play Store that I still maintain.

It streams six Brunei radio stations, and playback keeps going in the background. You can control it from the lock screen, the notification shade and quick settings. Before a stream starts, a custom connectivity check tests whether the connection actually works. That catches captive portals and Wi-Fi with no internet, which a simple “is there a network?” check would miss.

Newer features:

• Listening stats: your listening history is stored on the device, so you can see which stations you listen to most.
• Anonymous community contributions: opt-in and off by default. Listening data is shared anonymously through a cloud backend, with privacy built into the design. Only an explicit list of fields ever leaves the device, and nothing links a record back to a user.
• Sleep timer and themes.
• Production monitoring: crash reporting shows me when something breaks, and error reports are written so they don’t leak listening behaviour.

Along the way I’ve learned what running an app over time really involves: keeping up with platform updates, fixing bugs that only show up in the published version, meeting app store policy requirements, and getting ads to work well for a small local audience.