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 gives listeners an much more handy option to get pleasure from their favourite tracks. Propelled by Look, the staff was in a position to full the venture in simply two weeks, saving valuable growth time and boosting engagement.
Maximize visibility with user-friendly touchpoints
By showcasing the art work of their lately preferred tracks, the brand new Appreciated Tracks widget permits customers to to leap on to a selected track or entry their full monitor checklist proper from their dwelling display screen. This retains SoundCloud entrance and heart 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 permit customers simply management playback and like tracks. After lately updating the Participant widget based mostly on design suggestions, builders made positive to prioritize a customized interface for Appreciated Tracks. The brand new widget options each gentle and darkish modes, resizes freely to accommodate consumer preferences, and dynamically adapts its theme to enrich the consumer’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 an important function in streamlining the event of Appreciated Tracks. For builders already proficient in Compose, Look’s intuitive design felt acquainted, minimizing the educational curve and accelerating the staff’s onboarding. The platform’s assortment of code samples supplied a helpful place to begin, too, serving to builders rapidly grasp its capabilities and finest practices. “Utilizing pattern app repositories is a good way to be taught. I can try a complete repository and examine how the code operates,” stated Sigute Kateivaite, lead SoundCloud engineer on the Android staff. “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 further XML recordsdata when constructing, builders may create cleaner, extra readable code with much less boilerplate. Look additionally allowed them to work with modules individually, which means parts may very well be written and built-in one by one and reused for later iterations. By isolating parts, builders may rapidly 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 adjustments utilizing Android Studio’s assist for Look’s real-time preview enabled builders to construct parts in isolation without having to combine the UI element into the widget or deploy the total widget on the cellphone. They might characterize varied states, view all related circumstances, and evaluate adjustments to parts with out having to compile the total app. Put merely, Look made builders extra productive as a result of it allowed them to iterate sooner, refining the widget for a extra polished closing product.
Elevate app widgets with the ability of Look
With efficient new workflows and no main growth points, the SoundCloud staff 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 — energetic customers now work together with the widget to entry the app a number of instances a day on common.
Wanting forward, the SoundCloud staff is keen 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 staff is eager about together with different varieties of content material to additional enrich consumer expertise. Builders additionally hope emigrate the Participant widget over to Look to entry the framework’s strong theming choices, simplify resizing processes, and deal with some long-standing bugs.
Past the Appreciated Tracks and Participant options, the staff is happy concerning 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, gives 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 will help you design and create widgets. You may learn extra within the overview of Highlight Week: Widgets, which can be up to date all through the week.
