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 carry their concepts to life, and its builders are all the time looking for new methods to assist its customers create something they will 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 units 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 turned extra mainstream, the crew 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 wanted to prioritize the massive display expertise,” mentioned Tim Meson, the lead software program engineer and co-founder of FlipaClip. “We imagine the pill expertise is the perfect method to make use of FlipaClip as a result of it offers customers more room and precision to create.”
The FlipaClip crew acquired quite a few consumer requests to optimize styluses on tablets, like stress sensitivity and tilt for styluses and new brush varieties. So it gave their customers precisely what they wished. Not solely did they implement stylus help, however in addition they redesigned the massive display 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 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 crew.
Bettering massive display efficiency
One of many key areas the FlipaClip crew centered on was attaining low-latency drawing, which is vital for a easy and responsive expertise, particularly with a stylus. To assist with this, the crew created a complete 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,” mentioned 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 information, the FlipaClip crew considerably improved responsiveness and fluidity throughout a variety of units.
“The improved efficiency enabled us to lift canvas dimension 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.”
After optimizing for giant screens and decreasing their crash fee throughout system varieties, FlipaClip’s consumer satisfaction improved, with a 15% enchancment of their Play Retailer score for giant display units. The efficiency enhancements to the drawing engine have been significantly nicely acquired amongst customers, main to raised engagement and total constructive 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 supplied vital information 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 take pleasure in their favourite apps throughout system varieties 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 stories,” mentioned Tim. “From addressing consumer requests for added 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 customers.”
The FlipaClip crew famous that growing for Android stood out in a number of methods in comparison with different platforms. One key distinction is the libraries supplied by the Android crew, 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 may be up to date independently of the system’s system model, which is extremely environment friendly,” mentioned Tim. “Plus, Android documentation has gotten quite a bit higher through the years. The documentation for giant screens is a superb 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 crew 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.
Get began
Learn to enhance your UX by optimizing for massive screens.