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 Preferred 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 provides listeners an much more handy option to take pleasure in their favourite tracks. Propelled by Look, the group was capable of full the challenge in simply two weeks, saving treasured growth time and boosting engagement.
Maximize visibility with user-friendly touchpoints
By showcasing the paintings of their not too long ago favored tracks, the brand new Preferred Tracks widget permits customers to to leap on to a particular track or entry their full observe record proper from their house display screen. This retains SoundCloud entrance and middle for listeners, appearing as a shortcut to their private libraries and inspiring them to tune again in.
Preferred 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 not too long ago updating the Participant widget primarily based on design suggestions, builders made positive to prioritize a customized interface for Preferred Tracks. The brand new widget options each mild 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 decisions 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 position in streamlining the event of Preferred Tracks. For builders already proficient in Compose, Look’s intuitive design felt acquainted, minimizing the training curve and accelerating the group’s onboarding. The platform’s assortment of code samples offered a helpful start line, too, serving to builders shortly grasp its capabilities and greatest practices. “Utilizing pattern app repositories is an effective 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 group. “It sped up our widget growth by rather a lot.”
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 information 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 may very well be written and built-in one by one and reused for later iterations. By isolating elements, 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 flexibility to make modifications utilizing Android Studio’s help for Look’s real-time preview enabled builders to construct elements in isolation with no need to combine the UI element into the widget or deploy the complete widget on the telephone. They might signify varied states, view all related circumstances, and assessment modifications to elements with out having to compile the complete 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 group applauds Look for streamlining a profitable manufacturing. “With the brand new Preferred Tracks widget, rollout has been actually secure,” Sigute mentioned. “Improvement and the testing course of went actually easily.” Early information additionally exhibits promising outcomes — lively customers now work together with the widget to entry the app a number of occasions a day on common.
Wanting forward, the SoundCloud group is raring to make use of extra of Look to enhance present widgets, like adopting canonical layouts, and even develop new ones. Whereas the present Preferred Tracks widget focuses totally on picture show, the group is enthusiastic about together with different kinds 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 tackle some long-standing bugs.
Past the Preferred Tracks and Participant options, the group is happy in regards to the potential of utilizing Look to construct a wider vary of widgets. The modular, component-based structure of the Preferred Tracks widget, with reusable parts like UserAvatar and Emblem, provides a stable 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 assets—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.