Problem Statement
What is Provider in Flutter?
Explanation
Provider is a state management package that wraps InheritedWidget with a simple, intuitive API for dependency injection and state management. It's recommended by the Flutter team and is one of the most popular state management solutions because it's easy to learn, works well with Flutter's reactive model, and scales from simple to complex apps.
Provider handles the complexity of InheritedWidget, making it easy to provide values down the tree with ChangeNotifierProvider, listen to changes with Consumer widgets, and access data with Provider.of or context.watch. It eliminates boilerplate while maintaining InheritedWidget's efficiency of rebuilding only widgets that depend on changed data.
Provider supports multiple patterns including ChangeNotifier for mutable state with notifications, StreamProvider for reactive streams, FutureProvider for async data, and ValueProvider for simple immutable values. Its flexibility and simplicity make it suitable for most Flutter apps without the learning curve of more complex solutions.
