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 deliver their concepts to life, and its builders are at all times looking for new methods to assist its customers create something they will think about.
Growing pill assist was pivotal in enhancing FlipaClip customers’ creativity, giving them extra space and new strategies of animating the tales they wish to inform. Now, customers on these units can extra naturally deliver their visions to life because of Android’s intuitive options, like stylus compatibility and distinctive massive display menu interfaces.
Giant 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 rapidly grew to become a core revenue-generating viewers for FlipaClip, representing greater than 40% of the app’s whole income.
“We knew we wanted 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 means to make use of FlipaClip as a result of it provides customers extra space and precision to create.”
The FlipaClip workforce obtained quite a few person requests to optimize styluses on tablets, like stress sensitivity and tilt for styluses and new brush sorts. So it gave their customers precisely what they wished. Not solely did they implement stylus assist, however in addition they redesigned the massive display drawing space, permitting for extra customization with moveable instrument menus and the power to cover additional 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 lots 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 reaching low-latency drawing, which is essential 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 better number of brushes, and a drawing stage higher suited to pill customers with extra customization and extra on-screen actual property,” stated Tim.
Beforehand, FlipClip drawings have been rendered utilizing CPU-backed surfaces, leading to suboptimal efficiency, particularly on lower-end units. 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 spread of units.
“The improved efficiency enabled us to boost canvas dimension 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 big screens and decreasing their crash price throughout system sorts, FlipaClip’s person satisfaction improved, with a 15% enchancment of their Play Retailer ranking for big display units. The efficiency enhancements to the drawing engine have been notably effectively obtained amongst customers, main to higher engagement and total optimistic suggestions.
Utilizing Android Vitals, a instrument within the Google Play Console for monitoring the technical high quality of Android apps, was invaluable in figuring out efficiency points throughout the units FlipaClip customers have been on. This helped its engineers pinpoint particular units missing drawing efficiency and supplied essential knowledge to information their optimizations.
Listening to person suggestions
Giant display customers are Android’s fastest-growing viewers, reaching over 300 million customers worldwide. Permitting customers to take pleasure in their favourite apps throughout system 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 at all times to take the time to evaluation person suggestions and app stability studies,” stated Tim. “From addressing person requests for added stylus assist to pinpointing particular units to enhance drawing efficiency, these insights have been invaluable for enhancing 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 supplied by the Android workforce, which
are repeatedly 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 system’s system model, which is extremely environment friendly,” stated Tim. “Plus, Android documentation has gotten lots higher through the years. The documentation for big screens is a good instance. The directions are extra thorough, and all of the code examples and codelabs make it a lot simpler to know.”
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 units.
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