Posted by Summers Pittman – Developer Relations Engineer
To make it even simpler for customers to pay attention on Android, builders at SoundCloud — an artist-first music platform — turned to Jetpack Look to create a Favored 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 technique to get pleasure from their favourite tracks. Propelled by Look, the staff was capable of full the venture in simply two weeks, saving valuable growth time and boosting engagement.
Maximize visibility with user-friendly touchpoints
By showcasing the paintings of their lately appreciated tracks, the brand new Favored Tracks widget permits customers to to leap on to a particular track or entry their full monitor record proper from their residence display. This retains SoundCloud entrance and heart for listeners, performing as a shortcut to their private libraries and inspiring them to tune again in.
Favored 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 certain to prioritize a customized interface for Favored Tracks. The brand new widget options each mild and darkish modes, resizes freely to accommodate person preferences, and dynamically adapts its theme to enrich 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 function in streamlining the event of Favored 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 shortly 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,” mentioned Sigute Kateivaite, lead SoundCloud engineer on the Android staff. “It sped up our widget growth by so much.”
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 might create cleaner, extra readable code with much less boilerplate. Look additionally allowed them to work with modules individually, which means elements might be written and built-in one by one and reused for later iterations. By isolating elements, builders might shortly check modules, determine 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 flexibility to make modifications utilizing Android Studio’s assist for Look’s real-time preview enabled builders to construct elements in isolation while not having to combine the UI part into the widget or deploy the total widget on the cellphone. They may symbolize numerous states, view all related instances, and evaluate modifications to elements with out having to compile the total 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 last product.
Elevate app widgets with the facility 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 Favored Tracks widget, rollout has been actually secure,” Sigute mentioned. “Growth 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 occasions a day on common.
Wanting forward, the SoundCloud staff 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 Favored Tracks widget focuses totally on picture show, the staff is eager about together with different sorts 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 Favored Tracks and Participant options, the staff 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 Favored Tracks widget, with reusable components like UserAvatar and Emblem, gives a strong basis for future growth, promising to simplify processes from the beginning.
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This weblog put up is a part of our sequence: Highlight Week on Widgetsthe 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.
