Animo Apps

Plays

Cross Platform Mobile Development for Animo Apps and Their iOS and Android Animation Design Kit for Users To Create High Quality Animated Social Messages.

Summary

Antiblanks Were Invited to Partner With Animo Apps to Develop the Plays Mobile App.

Our brief was to work closely with their talented creative and product team to take complete ownership of the development of both the cross platform mobile app and the marketing website. When Antiblanks were approached the app had been through a year of research and development and the functionality and design for the proposed MVP was nearing completion and ready for the introduction of a technical team.

Backstory

Animo Apps Founder, Peter Dickinson Was Introduced to Antiblanks Founder, Dan Ivanovic by Recommendation From a Senior Creative Director at Global Digital Agency Tribal DDB Whilst Both He and Dan Were Working There in 2017.

Peter was looking to form a team to bring his vision of Plays to life and quickly identified the opportunity to partner with Dan who was fast becoming known in the agency for his ability to deliver on creative solutions where most other developers were struggling.

Teaming up was a natural choice; Peter being an experienced motion designer and creative director and Dan, a highly creative UX designer and full stack software developer with extensive animation and game development experience.

Problem

Plays Is an Ambitious and Technical Product That Required Carefully Considered Research and Development to Deliver on the Business Challenges Which Can Be Roughly Categorised as Follows:

1. Deliver more sophisticated animations than the competition

Employ the right technologies to innovate, gain competitive edge and deliver on the product USP

2. Faster time to market for new animation content

Create a product that would not be constrained by deployment processes and able to quickly deliver “over the air” animation content.

3. Support multiple platforms

Develop a robust solution that would reduce development costs and enable the business to reach a wider audience across both iOS and Android.

Solution

Deliver More Sophisticated Animations Than the Competition.

Innovation and competitive edge is paramount to the success of products within the animated messaging and content space. We conducted research into various solutions for natively rendering keyframe animations and quickly developed a Proof Of Concept (POC) that enabled us to research and select one of the following potential solutions:

1. Render animations using a web view based animation library

2. Develop a custom native animation library

3. Select and adapt a third party animation library

We discounted using a web view based library immediately due to the poor performance and lack of control a sandboxed solution like this would present.

Our first POC used pre-interpolated keyframe data to draw and render animation content using the iOS native Core Animation framework. The POC gave us some positive results, however, it quickly became clear that whilst this solution would be efficient, it would consume a vast amount of development time and budget to build a mature and sophisticated engine.

After further research, we evaluated and selected a mature open source library that would enable us to quickly deliver a sophisticated and fully featured native animation engine across both iOS and Android. This decision reduced development time and allowed the Animo Apps creative team to be able to quickly test and develop high quality animations in parallel to our development work.

Faster time to market for new animation content.

Fast content delivery is key to reducing time to market, maintaining competitive edge and keeping subscribers. Content baked into apps and delivered via updates to the stores are slower and require the user regularly updates their app version.

We developed a solution that would download animation assets “over the air” and this produced the following results:

1. Small app bundle size

Optimised for stores so that the initial app download and installation is lightning fast.

2. Automatically updated animation content

Ability to automatically download and update animation content on installed devices.

3. Dynamic font loading

We developed a solution that would dynamically load font data into the device and allow us to quickly deliver new fonts without re-submission to the app store.

Support Multiple Platforms

Gaining market share requires businesses to make their products available across multiple platforms. This requires either a multi disciplined development team or a number of teams developing the same product for each platform. This in turn drives up development costs and produces ongoing maintenance concerns and resourcing risk.

We developed a hybrid solution using React Native to deliver the presentational and core business logic components of the application to both iOS and Android. Our animation engine selection meant that wiring up our application consisted of simply developing a custom React Native Bridge for each platform and adapting the animation engine to support our specific product customisations.

Using React Native enabled us to quickly deliver a native experience to iOS and Android whilst saving Animo Apps a huge amount of money and development time.

The Outcome

Selecting a Hybrid App Development Framework and Mature Third Party Animation Library Has Enabled Us to Quickly Deliver a Robust and Sophisticated Product Built by Just One Team and Supported Across Multiple Platforms.

4.9% App Store rating

1-2k daily users

17% user retention

200k+ installs

The early pre-marketing launch results were very promising and validated the technical choices we’d made and the quality of the product we delivered.

The core application logic that we developed within React Native has laid a solid foundation for future product features and will also be re-used in Plays-X, a web based version of the product that will allow us to develop at a reduced development time and cost to Animo Apps.

Plays entered the animated messaging and content space as one of the best animation apps and at time of writing, Plays was the only app able to release new animation content within a few hours and without requiring a new release of the app to the stores.

Reflection

This Project Has Been a Great Success for Our Team and We’re Proud of the Product We’ve Developed However, Being Self Critical, There Are Always Areas for Improvement:

Insights & analytics

We quickly delivered prototype builds to our cohort of TestFlight users, however, our implementation of crash logging and analytics was delivered a little later in the development roadmap. Insights & analytics are important not just in production but especially during beta testing so we will be sure to factor this in at the very start of our next project.

Back end infrastructure

We chose to create a custom back end for the app on AWS but later retired this in favour of using Firebase when new requirements presented the need to integrate other services such as PUSH notifications. We should have anticipated that common services like PUSH notifications would later be required and integrated a more robust back end solution from the outset. This prompted us to review our cross platform mobile development boilerplate and Firebase was included into this for future projects.

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