Posted by Maru Ahues Bouza, Director, Android Developer Relations

Zoom is an all-in-one collaboration platform. Whether or not supporting work streams by video, chat, or the platform’s sensible recordings and whiteboard instruments, the crew at Zoom goals to simplify private {and professional} communications.

For Zoom engineers, creating the perfect expertise for customers means assembly them the place they’re throughout quite a lot of gadgets with distinctive type components. At the moment, there are greater than 270 million massive screens and foldables in use throughout the Android ecosystem. With this in thoughts, the Zoom crew noticed a chance to spice up the app’s assist throughout the Android ecosystem, serving to to make sure a seamless consumer expertise on any supported machine.

Zoom customers spend extra time on massive screens

In the previous couple of years, the Zoom crew has seen elevated pill utilization amongst its consumer base. The Zoom crew has seen elevated pill utilization amongst its consumer base, and individuals who use Zoom on each their cellphone and pill spend about 62% extra time on their pill. As well as, Zoom pill customers engaged about 2X extra through Zoom than cellphone customers.

Zoom engineers wished to offer customers on massive screens the identical expertise on their most popular gadgets as these utilizing the app on a smartphone or pc.

“We wished to verify massive display customers have the perfect expertise attainable when utilizing Zoom,” stated Will Chan, a product supervisor at Zoom. “Making certain we might scale our cellular UI to handle our consumer wants — no matter their machine measurement — was essential, whether or not it is telephones, foldables, or tablets.”

Bettering multi-window assist on foldables

Zoom engineers began by utilizing the Jetpack WindowManager library, which supplies builders all of the sources they should begin optimizing throughout type components. Utilizing the library, Zoom engineers made the app’s tabletop UI for foldables extra environment friendly by putting movies on the highest display and shifting any controls to the underside display. This gave customers a extra hands-free expertise, making it simpler for them to make use of the app with their foldable gadgets.

For foldables, Zoom engineers additionally optimized the app’s Staff Chat. After overhauling this characteristic, Zoom’s Staff Chat labored seamlessly in split-screen mode. When in portrait mode, the app would now present a chat preview on the left aspect of the display and the chat particulars on the suitable. Small adjustments like this make higher use of on-screen house in order that customers can extra simply handle the duties at hand.

Including extra options can result in better complexity. To keep away from complicating the app’s UI on foldables, Zoom engineers used ConstraintLayouts. These assist simplify the app’s interface, decreasing a whole lot of the complexity that comes with creating a number of layouts on a tool. As a bonus, ConstraintLayouts additionally enhance the app’s efficiency whereas switching between layouts, enhancing useability total for customers.

Taking advantage of bigger screens

Massive display gadgets give customers significantly extra onscreen actual property to work with. And with a lot out there house on these type components, Zoom engineers wished to up the app’s multi-window assist by permitting customers to enter picture-in-picture mode. Simply as with optimizing for split-screen modes on foldables, picture-in-picture permits customers to higher multitask whereas they’re in conferences or taking a cellphone name.

Zoom engineers additionally tweaked the app’s UI to scale accordingly when massive display customers resized their home windows. To do that, the Zoom crew used the resizeable emulator in Android studios. Collectively, these instruments let the engineering crew preview how the brand new experiences would look throughout many various gadgets, permitting builders to check their optimization earlier than placing it into manufacturing.

“Resizable emulators and Android Studios made testing and creating so much simpler, guaranteeing the consumer expertise is nice on a number of massive display gadgets,” stated Will.

Straightforward optimization throughout Android

The suite of instruments and sources offered by Android made it simpler than ever for Zoom engineers to enhance its app throughout type components. Contemplating there are such a lot of customers on massive screens and foldable gadgets right this moment, Zoom builders had been glad that they might create a extra cohesive UX with out having to exhaust all their sources.

The Zoom crew is worked up by the worldwide attain of the Android platform and appears ahead to seeing what Android will add to its already-large pool of developer sources and instruments.

“Our engineering crew appreciates all of the investments being made within the Jetpack libraries. It’s made their lives a lot simpler whereas creating for Android,” stated Will.

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