Caching for both Flutter/native and over several Flutter Engines

[estroh-disney]

Use case

Problem: Our team requires a lot of caching as our users frequently run in to issues with low connectivity. We would like to have a common cache between Flutter and native. We would also like to have a persistent cache between Flutter engines.

Alternative Solution: Use cached_network_image which uses flutter_cache_manager. This solution isn't being kept up to date, not having been updated in over a year, as well as having many defects.

Proposal

Create a Flutter first-party package that handles caching on disk so that it can be persisted for a Flutter/native solution and a solution over multiple Flutter engines. Since images are one of the most common uses, a simple implementation for caching images over the network would be ideal.

[tirth-patel-nc]

@estroh-disney thanks for the report. labelling it as a new proposal. #47378 #19996 might be related.

[stuartmorgan-g]

@kevmoo Can you provide any context about this being annotated as a blocker? I would expect that an application-wide, multi-engine cache system would be easiest to build at the application level, and certainly wouldn't expect it to require any changes in the Flutter SDK itself, so I'm not sure what would be blocked here.