Fire-and-forget async load means a community channel renders as Icons.lock (the private default) on the first frame, then swaps once communities load. On slower devices this flickers visibly.

Two options:

• Render a neutral placeholder (or hide the icon) until _communities has loaded at least once, or
• Make CommunityStore.loadCommunities() return a synchronously-cached list when one is available.

Also note: _communities never refreshes while this screen is open, so edits made elsewhere won't be reflected until the screen is recreated — acceptable for now but worth a one-line comment if you don't want to wire it to the store.

Thanks. I'm new to Flutter & Dart, so I'm still getting up to speed on a lot of this.

Does channels_screen have the same flicker problem? It looks like the only difference between the two is that here _loadCommunities() is run from SchedulerBinding.instance.addPostFrameCallback and in channels_list it's from WidgetsBinding.

I regret to say I don't understand the second option.

Re the refresh note: I think I get it. We only load communities the first time, and if we navigate back here after changing them, the list will be stale? 20 minutes of reading about this stuff has mainly taught me that there are good idiomatic ways of managing this in Flutter, but I don't yet know what they are.

I force pushed what I have so far, which fixes all the issues you pointed out except this one.

I'll do some testing I've noticed this before on my phone when I had lots of channels and I put them in custom positions.

Please dedupe this with channels_screen.dart in this PR rather than as a follow-up.

channels_screen.dart:378-409 already classifies channels with the same logic via _getCommunityForChannel / _isCommunityPublicChannel. With the new ChannelType enum living in the model, the natural home for this is a static helper alongside it, e.g.:

// lib/models/channel.dart
enum ChannelType { public, private, hashtag, communityPublic, communityHashtag }

extension ChannelTypeClassify on Channel {
  ChannelType classify(Iterable<Community> communities) {
    for (final community in communities) {
      if (pskHex == Channel.formatPskHex(community.deriveCommunityPublicPsk())) {
        return ChannelType.communityPublic;
      }
      for (final hashtag in community.hashtagChannels) {
        if (pskHex == Channel.formatPskHex(community.deriveCommunityHashtagPsk(hashtag))) {
          return ChannelType.communityHashtag;
        }
      }
    }
    if (isPublicChannel) return ChannelType.public;
    if (name.startsWith('#')) return ChannelType.hashtag;
    return ChannelType.private;
  }
}

Then channel_chat_screen.dart calls widget.channel.classify(_communities) and channels_screen.dart is refactored to use the same call instead of its ad-hoc _getCommunityForChannel / _isCommunityPublicChannel. That keeps the two screens from drifting as new channel types are added.

Also rename to _getChannelType / drop entirely once this is extracted.

Visible regression: the previous AppBar icon was Icon(..., size: 20). This Icon(icon) falls back to the AppBar default (24), so the title-row icon is now noticeably larger than before.

If you keep the size, also scale the community badge Container (currently 14×14) proportionally so the annotation doesn't overflow the smaller icon.

Nit: this comment is misleading — the Stack is already used for the community-badge annotation a few lines below, not "in case we want to add" one. Either remove or reword to describe what it actually does.

I meant "in case we want to add one" because the inclusion of the badge is conditional, not for future development. But the comment clearly does more harm than good, so out it goes.