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 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 affords listeners an much more handy method to get pleasure from their favourite tracks. Propelled by Look, the staff 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 art work of their not too long ago favored tracks, the brand new Preferred Tracks widget permits customers to to leap on to a particular music or entry their full monitor record proper from their dwelling display. This retains SoundCloud entrance and heart for listeners, performing 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 allow customers simply management playback and like tracks. After not too long ago updating the Participant widget based mostly on design suggestions, builders made certain to prioritize a customized interface for Preferred 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 Preferred Tracks. For builders already proficient in Compose, Look’s intuitive design felt acquainted, minimizing the training 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 an effective way to be taught. I can try a whole 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 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, that means elements may very well be written and built-in one after the other and reused for later iterations. By isolating elements, builders might 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 modifications utilizing Android Studio’s help for Look’s real-time preview enabled builders to construct elements in isolation without having to combine the UI part into the widget or deploy the complete widget on the cellphone. They may symbolize numerous states, view all related instances, and evaluation 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 quicker, refining the widget for a extra polished closing 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 Preferred Tracks widget, rollout has been actually steady,” Sigute mentioned. “Growth and the testing course of went actually easily.” Early knowledge additionally reveals promising outcomes — lively customers now work together with the widget to entry the app a number of occasions a day on common.
Trying forward, the SoundCloud staff 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 staff is inquisitive about together with different forms 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 handle some long-standing bugs.
Past the Preferred Tracks and Participant options, the staff 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 Brand, affords 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 can assist 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.