Firebase Cloud Firestore Real-Time Listeners in Flutter Apps

Most Firestore users know queries, but do you know about real-time listeners?

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Firestore’s .get() method is great for snapshots—but what if your app needs live updates without polling?

Enter: real-time listeners.

How do they work?

Real-time listeners make your app reactively reflect database changes, instantly. Think about chat apps, dashboards, or collaborative docs for example.

You don’t need to re-fetch data after every write. Firestore’s snapshots() stream keeps your UI updated with minimal effort.

Code example

FirebaseFirestore.instance
  .collection('messages')
  .snapshots()
  .listen((snapshot) {
    for (var doc in snapshot.docs) {
      print(doc.data());
    }
});

It even handles reconnections and caches updates offline (on mobile). You just subscribe and forget.

To enable Firestore cache in Flutter web apps, read this article below.