Posted by Miguel Montemayor – Developer Relations Engineer
FlipaClip is an app for creating dynamic and fascinating 2D animations. Its highly effective toolkit permits animators of all ranges to carry their concepts to life, and its builders are all the time trying to find new methods to assist its customers create something they’ll think about.
Growing pill assist was pivotal in bettering FlipaClip customers’ creativity, giving them extra space and new strategies of animating the tales they wish to inform. Now, customers on these gadgets can extra naturally carry their visions to life because of Android’s intuitive options, like stylus compatibility and distinctive massive display menu interfaces.
Massive screens are a pure canvas for animation
FlipaClip initially launched as a cellphone app, however as tablets grew to become extra mainstream, the workforce knew it wanted to adapt its app to take full benefit of bigger screens as a result of they’re extra pure animating platforms. After updating the app, pill customers shortly grew to become a core revenue-generating viewers for FlipaClip, representing greater than 40% of the app’s complete income.
“We knew we would have liked to prioritize the massive display expertise,” stated Tim Meson, the lead software program engineer and co-founder of FlipaClip. “We imagine the pill expertise is the perfect manner to make use of FlipaClip as a result of it offers customers extra space and precision to create.”
The FlipaClip workforce obtained quite a few consumer requests to optimize styluses on tablets, like strain sensitivity and tilt for styluses and new brush sorts. So it gave their customers precisely what they needed. Not solely did they implement stylus assist, however additionally they redesigned the massive display drawing space, permitting for extra customization with moveable device menus and the flexibility to cover further instruments.
Now, distinctive menu interfaces and stylus assist present a extra immersive and highly effective inventive expertise for FlipaClip’s massive display customers. By implementing most of the options its customers requested and optimizing present workspaces, FlipaClip elevated its US pill customers by 54% in simply 4 months. The standard of the animations made by FlipaClip artists additionally visibly elevated, in keeping with the workforce.
Bettering massive display efficiency
One of many key areas the FlipaClip workforce targeted on was attaining low-latency drawing, which is vital for a clean and responsive expertise, particularly with a stylus. To assist with this, the workforce created a whole drawing engine from the bottom up utilizing Android NDK. This engine additionally improved the general app responsiveness whatever the enter methodology.
“Specializing in GPU optimizations helped create extra responsive brushes, a higher number of brushes, and a drawing stage higher fitted to pill customers with extra customization and extra on-screen actual property,” stated Tim.
Beforehand, FlipClip drawings had been rendered utilizing CPU-backed surfaces, leading to suboptimal efficiency, particularly on lower-end gadgets. By using the GPU for rendering and consolidating contact enter with the app’s historic contact knowledge, the FlipaClip workforce considerably improved responsiveness and fluidity throughout a variety of gadgets.
“The improved efficiency enabled us to boost canvas measurement limits nearer to 2K decision,” stated Tim. “It additionally resolved a number of reported application-not-responding errors by stopping extreme drawing makes an attempt on the display.”
After optimizing for giant screens and decreasing their crash price throughout gadget sorts, FlipaClip’s consumer satisfaction improved, with a 15% enchancment of their Play Retailer ranking for giant display gadgets. The efficiency enhancements to the drawing engine had been notably properly obtained amongst customers, main to raised engagement and total optimistic suggestions.
Utilizing Android Vitals, a device within the Google Play Console for monitoring the technical high quality of Android apps, was invaluable in figuring out efficiency points throughout the gadgets FlipaClip customers had been on. This helped its engineers pinpoint particular gadgets missing drawing efficiency and offered vital knowledge to information their optimizations.
Listening to consumer suggestions
Massive display customers are Android’s fastest-growing viewers, reaching over 300 million customers worldwide. Permitting customers to get pleasure from their favourite apps throughout gadget sorts whereas making use of the bigger display on tablets, means a extra participating expertise for customers to like.
“One key takeaway for us was all the time to take the time to overview consumer suggestions and app stability experiences,” stated Tim. “From addressing consumer requests for added stylus assist to pinpointing particular gadgets to enhance drawing efficiency, these insights have been invaluable for bettering the app and addressing ache factors of huge display customers.”
The FlipaClip workforce famous that creating for Android stood out in a number of methods in comparison with different platforms. One key distinction is the libraries offered by the Android workforce, which
are constantly up to date and improved, permitting its engineers to seamlessly handle and resolve any points with out requiring customers to improve their Android OS.
“Libraries like Jetpack Compose may be up to date independently of the gadget’s system model, which is extremely environment friendly,” stated Tim. “Plus, Android documentation has gotten quite a bit higher over time. The documentation for giant screens is a good instance. The directions are extra thorough, and all of the code examples and codelabs make it a lot simpler to grasp.”
FlipaClip engineers plan to proceed optimizing the app’s UI for bigger screens and enhance its distinctive drawing instruments. The workforce additionally needs to introduce extra groundbreaking animation instruments, seamless cross-device syncing, and tablet-specific gestures to enhance the general animation expertise on massive display gadgets.
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