Posted by Miguel Montemayor – Developer Relations Engineer
FlipaClip is an app for creating dynamic and interesting 2D animations. Its highly effective toolkit permits animators of all ranges to convey their concepts to life, and its builders are all the time trying to find new methods to assist its customers create something they will think about.
Rising pill help 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 units can extra naturally convey their visions to life because of Android’s intuitive options, like stylus compatibility and distinctive massive display screen menu interfaces.
Massive screens are a pure canvas for animation
FlipaClip initially launched as a telephone app, however as tablets grew to become extra mainstream, the staff 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 screen 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 staff obtained quite a few person requests to optimize styluses on tablets, like strain sensitivity and tilt for styluses and new brush varieties. So it gave their customers precisely what they needed. Not solely did they implement stylus help, however additionally they redesigned the massive display screen drawing space, permitting for extra customization with moveable device menus and the power to cover further instruments.
Now, distinctive menu interfaces and stylus help present a extra immersive and highly effective artistic expertise for FlipaClip’s massive display screen customers. By implementing most of the options its customers requested and optimizing current 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 line with the staff.
Enhancing massive display screen efficiency
One of many key areas the FlipaClip staff targeted on was attaining low-latency drawing, which is important for a clean and responsive expertise, particularly with a stylus. To assist with this, the staff created a whole drawing engine from the bottom up utilizing Android NDK. This engine additionally improved the general app responsiveness whatever the enter technique.
“Specializing in GPU optimizations helped create extra responsive brushes, a better 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 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 staff considerably improved responsiveness and fluidity throughout a spread of units.
“The improved efficiency enabled us to lift 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 screen.”
After optimizing for giant screens and decreasing their crash charge throughout gadget varieties, FlipaClip’s person satisfaction improved, with a 15% enchancment of their Play Retailer ranking for giant display screen units. The efficiency enhancements to the drawing engine have been significantly properly obtained amongst customers, main to higher 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 units FlipaClip customers have been on. This helped its engineers pinpoint particular units missing drawing efficiency and offered important knowledge to information their optimizations.
Listening to person suggestions
Massive display screen customers are Android’s fastest-growing viewers, reaching over 300 million customers worldwide. Permitting customers to get pleasure from their favourite apps throughout gadget varieties whereas making use of the bigger display screen on tablets, means a extra partaking expertise for customers to like.
“One key takeaway for us was all the time to take the time to evaluate person suggestions and app stability studies,” stated Tim. “From addressing person requests for extra stylus help to pinpointing particular units to enhance drawing efficiency, these insights have been invaluable for bettering the app and addressing ache factors of enormous display screen customers.”
The FlipaClip staff 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 staff, which
are repeatedly up to date and improved, permitting its engineers to seamlessly deal with and resolve any points with out requiring customers to improve their Android OS.
“Libraries like Jetpack Compose will 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 through the years. 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 know.”
FlipaClip engineers plan to proceed optimizing the app’s UI for bigger screens and enhance its distinctive drawing instruments. The staff additionally desires to introduce extra groundbreaking animation instruments, seamless cross-device syncing, and tablet-specific gestures to enhance the general animation expertise on massive display screen units.
Get began
Discover ways to enhance your UX by optimizing for massive screens.