Posted by Summers Pittman – Developer Relations Engineer

To make it even simpler for customers to hear on Android, builders at SoundCloud — an artist-first music platform — turned to Jetpack Look to create a Appreciated Tracks widget for his or her highly-rated app, which boasts 4.6 stars and over 100 million downloads. With a catalog of over 400 million tracks from greater than 40 million creators, SoundCloud is devoted to connecting artists and followers by way of music, and this newest replace to its Android app affords listeners an much more handy strategy to take pleasure in their favourite tracks. Propelled by Look, the crew was in a position to full the challenge in simply two weeks, saving valuable growth time and boosting engagement.

Maximize visibility with user-friendly touchpoints

By showcasing the paintings of their not too long ago appreciated tracks, the brand new Appreciated Tracks widget permits customers to to leap on to a particular tune or entry their full monitor record proper from their house display. This retains SoundCloud entrance and middle for listeners, performing as a shortcut to their private libraries and inspiring them to tune again in.

Appreciated Tracks isn’t SoundCloud’s first widget. Over a decade in the past, SoundCloud builders used RemoteViews to create a Participant widget that allow customers simply management playback and like tracks. After not too long ago updating the Participant widget based mostly on design suggestions, builders made certain to prioritize a personalised interface for Appreciated Tracks. The brand new widget options each mild and darkish modes, resizes freely to accommodate person preferences, and dynamically adapts its theme to enhance the person’s wallpaper. Backed by Look, these design selections ensured the widget isn’t simply seamless to make use of but additionally serves as an interesting and tailor-made gateway into the SoundCloud app.

Speed up growth cycles with Look

Look additionally performed a vital position in streamlining the event of Appreciated Tracks. For builders already proficient in Compose, Look’s intuitive design felt acquainted, minimizing the training curve and accelerating the crew’s onboarding. The platform’s assortment of code samples offered a helpful place to begin, too, serving to builders shortly grasp its capabilities and greatest practices. “Utilizing pattern app repositories is a good way to be taught. I can take a look at a whole repository and examine how the code operates,” stated Sigute Kateivaite, lead SoundCloud engineer on the Android crew. “It sped up our widget growth by lots.”

The declarative nature of Look’s UI was particularly helpful to builders. As a result of they didn’t have to make use of extra XML recordsdata when constructing, builders might create cleaner, extra readable code with much less boilerplate. Look additionally allowed them to work with modules individually, that means parts may very well be written and built-in separately and reused for later iterations. By isolating parts, builders might shortly take a look at modules, establish and resolve points, and construct for various states with out duplication, resulting in extra environment friendly workflows.

Look’s design additionally improved the general code high quality. The power to make modifications utilizing Android Studio’s help for Look’s real-time preview enabled builders to construct parts in isolation without having to combine the UI part into the widget or deploy the complete widget on the telephone. They might signify numerous states, view all related circumstances, and overview modifications to parts with out having to compile the complete app. Put merely, Look made builders extra productive as a result of it allowed them to iterate quicker, refining the widget for a extra polished remaining product.

Elevate app widgets with the ability of Look

With efficient new workflows and no main growth points, the SoundCloud crew applauds Look for streamlining a profitable manufacturing. “With the brand new Appreciated Tracks widget, rollout has been actually steady,” Sigute stated. “Improvement and the testing course of went actually easily.” Early information additionally reveals promising outcomes — lively customers now work together with the widget to entry the app a number of instances a day on common.

Wanting forward, the SoundCloud crew is raring to make use of extra of Look to enhance current widgets, like adopting canonical layouts, and even develop new ones. Whereas the present Appreciated Tracks widget focuses totally on picture show, the crew is excited by together with different forms of content material to additional enrich person expertise. Builders additionally hope emigrate the Participant widget over to Look to entry the framework’s strong theming choices, simplify resizing processes, and tackle some long-standing bugs.

Past the Appreciated Tracks and Participant options, the crew is worked up in regards to the potential of utilizing Look to construct a wider vary of widgets. The modular, component-based structure of the Appreciated Tracks widget, with reusable parts like UserAvatar and Emblem, affords a strong basis for future growth, promising to simplify processes from the beginning.

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This weblog submit is a part of our collection: Highlight Week on Widgets, the place we offer sources—weblog posts, movies, pattern code, and extra—all designed that can assist you design and create widgets. You possibly can learn extra within the overview of Highlight Week: Widgets, which can be up to date all through the week.