Use case

When using CanvasKit and trying to display emojis, issue #76248 arises, i.e. "Emojis take a few seconds to render on canvaskit".

This means that when first displaying emojis, tofu boxes appear for a few seconds.

Proposal

It would be great to have an exposed function that allows loading the Noto font on app start, so that when the first emojis are displayed, the Noto font is already preloaded.

Workaround

The way we solve this currently is the following:

@override
Widget build(BuildContext build) {
  return Stack(
    children: [
      // w/e
      const Opacity(
        opacity: 0,
        // Insert invisible emoji in order to load the emoji font in CanvasKit
        // on startup. Note that this is a *workaround solution* - we want to
        // find a better one :)
        child: Text('✨'),
      ),
    ],
  );
}

This is inserted on startup. As soon as we actually display emojis, the Noto font has already been downloaded. However, this really feels like a hack.