Building privacy-first applications that give users genuine control over their own data requires more than good intentions — it requires solid engineering infrastructure. The ANU Software Innovation Institute has developed and published a suite of open-source Flutter/Dart packages on pub.dev that make it straightforward for any developer to build cross-platform applications connected to Solid Personal Online Datastores (PODs) — with authentication, encrypted storage, and fine-grained access control built in from the start.
A single Flutter codebase, backed by these packages, compiles to Web, Android, iOS, macOS, Linux, and Windows — with user-controlled, encrypted data vaults on any Solid-compliant server.
The packages are built on the W3C Solid specification for decentralised data management: data is stored in PODs that are separated from applications, user-controlled with fine-grained access permissions, interoperable across all Solid-compliant apps, and represented in linked data format (RDF/Turtle). Flutter's single codebase approach means these packages compile to any platform through standard HTTP APIs.
The three packages
Core POD operations — encrypted read/write of Turtle files, ACL permission management, access sharing via public-key cryptography, and AES/RSA key management.
Full-featured UI scaffold for Solid apps — responsive navigation, login screens, file management widgets, permission UIs, and light/dark theme support.
Solid-OIDC authentication flow supporting Android, iOS, Desktop and Web, with DPoP token generation for secure resource access and JWT verification.
Getting started
The quickest path to a working Solid app is
solidui's SolidScaffold — a drop-in replacement
for Flutter's standard Scaffold that provides responsive navigation,
file management, security key handling, and authentication screens
specifically designed for Solid applications. From there,
solidpod handles all encrypted read/write operations and
permission management against any Solid server, while solid_auth
manages the full Solid-OIDC authentication flow across all platforms.
All three packages are published under an MIT licence and freely available on pub.dev. The SII team has used them to build more than a dozen demonstration apps — including NotePod, HealthPod, InnerPod, FilePod, TodoPod, GeoPod, RoloPod, and MSFatigue — all of which run live at solidcommunity.au. Source code is available at github.com/anusii.