Building an Ethiopian Calendar in Flutter
Most date libraries pretend the world runs on one calendar. Building the Zemen App — my Ethiopian calendar and date converter on the Play Store — taught me otherwise. The app is 100% offline: it converts between the Ethiopian and Gregorian calendars, tracks national holidays like Enkutatash, Meskel, and Timkat, and carries a full database of Orthodox Tewahedo fasting days, all without a single…
The Ethiopian calendar presents a unique challenge to developers, as it deviates from the widely-used Gregorian calendar. Building the Zemen App, an Ethiopian calendar and date converter for Android, taught the author the importance of creating a self-contained calendar engine that can operate entirely offline. This engine converts between the Ethiopian and Gregorian calendars, tracks national holidays, and models Orthodox Tewahedo fasting days, all without relying on network calls.
The core of the app is a Dart-based calendar engine that performs exact integer math to handle conversions between the two calendars.
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