---
id: intro
title: Intro
---
import useBaseUrl from '@docusaurus/useBaseUrl';

<img alt="Android App Tutorial" src={useBaseUrl("img/android-tutorial.png")} />


Flipper was designed with extensibility in mind from the start to enable engineers to quickly build quality, easy-to-use tools for their own needs and applications.
In addition to building plugins for the existing platforms, you can also extend the capabilities of Flipper to other platforms by conforming to the `FlipperClient` API. After this, you can make use of the existing desktop plugins by writing client plugins that conform to the same API.

In this tutorial, we show you how how easy it is to build a Flipper plugin
for Android and iOS that extracts data from your native application and
displays it in the desktop app.

We then guide you through the process of converting a basic table plugin into
a full plugin with custom UI components.

Before we get started, let's define two terms we will use frequently throughout
this tutorial:

- **Desktop app**: This is the Electron-based application you run on your desktop.
- **Mobile client**: This is the mobile app running most likely on a phone or other mobile device. It connects to the desktop app.
