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 convey their concepts to life, and its builders are at all times trying to find new methods to assist its customers create something they’ll think about.
Rising pill help was pivotal in bettering FlipaClip customers’ creativity, giving them more room and new strategies of animating the tales they wish to inform. Now, customers on these gadgets 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 cellphone app, however as tablets turned 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 shortly turned a core revenue-generating viewers for FlipaClip, representing greater than 40% of the app’s whole income.
“We knew we would have liked to prioritize the big display screen expertise,” mentioned Tim Meson, the lead software program engineer and co-founder of FlipaClip. “We imagine the pill expertise is the perfect approach to make use of FlipaClip as a result of it offers customers more room and precision to create.”
The FlipaClip staff 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 needed. Not solely did they implement stylus help, however in addition they redesigned the big display screen drawing space, permitting for extra customization with moveable instrument 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 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 accordance with the staff.
Bettering massive display screen efficiency
One of many key areas the FlipaClip staff centered on was reaching low-latency drawing, which is crucial for a easy 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 methodology.
“Specializing in GPU optimizations helped create extra responsive brushes, a higher number of brushes, and a drawing stage higher suited to pill customers with extra customization and extra on-screen actual property,” mentioned 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 staff considerably improved responsiveness and fluidity throughout a variety of gadgets.
“The improved efficiency enabled us to boost canvas measurement limits nearer to 2K decision,” mentioned 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 lowering their crash charge throughout machine sorts, FlipaClip’s person satisfaction improved, with a 15% enchancment of their Play Retailer ranking for giant display screen gadgets. The efficiency enhancements to the drawing engine had 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 gadgets FlipaClip customers had been on. This helped its engineers pinpoint particular gadgets missing drawing efficiency and offered crucial 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 machine sorts 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 at all times to take the time to evaluation person suggestions and app stability studies,” mentioned Tim. “From addressing person requests for added stylus help to pinpointing particular gadgets to enhance drawing efficiency, these insights have been invaluable for bettering the app and addressing ache factors of huge display screen customers.”
The FlipaClip staff famous that growing 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 constantly 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 might be up to date independently of the machine’s system model, which is extremely environment friendly,” mentioned Tim. “Plus, Android documentation has gotten loads 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 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 gadgets.
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