How I Built a Digital Business Card App with Flutter, HCE, and Claude Code

Source: Dev.to

After 25 years in industrial maintenance, I shipped my first mobile app. Here’s the technical breakdown.

The Stack

• Flutter – Single codebase for Android (iOS coming)
• Firebase – Auth, Firestore, Cloud Storage
• Claude Code – AI‑assisted development and debugging

The Challenge: Native NFC Emulation (HCE)

Most “digital business card” apps just generate QR codes. I wanted real NFC tap‑to‑share, like Google Pay but for contact info.

Android’s Host Card Emulation (HCE) lets a phone act as an NFC card. The tricky part was implementing NDEF message handling properly. Flutter doesn’t have mature HCE packages, so I wrote platform channels to handle the native Android side.

Why Claude Code Changed Everything

As a solo developer, Claude Code was a game‑changer:

• Multi‑file refactoring without losing context
• Debugging NFC edge cases methodically
• Writing Firebase security rules correctly the first time

I also tested Gemini Pro 3 – excellent for reasoning through architecture decisions, but Claude Code was more reliable for actual implementation.

Lessons Learned

• Start with Firebase – Zero backend setup, ship faster
• Flutter hot reload – Iteration speed is insane
• HCE is underused – Most devs don’t know Android phones can emulate NFC cards natively

Try It

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Questions about the implementation? Ask in the comments.