< all work · 03 / 05
Cached Network Image CE
The maintained fork of Flutter’s most popular image-caching package, rebuilt on a caching engine that doesn’t block the UI thread.
- Role
- Maintainer, Development, Open Source
- Status
- Maintained, on pub.dev (MIT)
- Stack
- Dart · Flutter · hive_ce · IndexedDB
- 8×faster cache reads (16 → 2 ms)
- 4×faster writes (116 → 29 ms)
- 2.9×faster cleanup (55 → 19 ms)
Cache metadata operations, 10 KB payload, iPhone Simulator.
01 The problem
cached_network_image is one of the most used packages in the Flutter ecosystem, and it has been effectively unmaintained since August 2024, with 300+ open issues including memory leaks and scroll jank.
Under the hood it routes every “have I downloaded this already?” check through a platform channel into SQLite. On image-heavy lists you can feel it.
02 What I built
Replaced sqflite with hive_ce, a pure-Dart, non-blocking store, for cache metadata. Image bytes stay on the native filesystem; no platform channel or SQL parser in the hot path.
Real web support with a persistent IndexedDB cache, HTTP and cache interceptors, pluggable TTL or LRU eviction, a pre-caching API, and a hook for formats Flutter can’t decode.
Kept the widget and provider API, so migrating is a dependency swap.
03 Worth knowing
- Listed on Flutter Gems.
- Used by open-source apps such as Kazumi, PiliPlus, MusicPod and plezy.
- Honest trade-off documented up front: switching engines means users re-download images once.
