Posted by the Android group
Clue is a freemium menstrual well being utility based in 2012 and was among the many earliest builders in femtech. The app helps ladies and individuals who menstruate monitor their cycles and serves 11 million month-to-month lively customers in over 190 nations. Further options, together with instruments for monitoring prenatal and postpartum well being, can be found via the app’s subscription tier, Clue Plus.
Accessing streamlined and simply digestible menstrual well being knowledge may be a useful useful resource for individuals who menstruate, and Clue has supported these insights for Android customers for over a decade. As with every codebase, nevertheless, the Clue app inherited technical debt. This restricted the group’s skill to push modifications and options rapidly, scale developer efforts, and supply a contemporary UI to its customers.
Clue beforehand relied closely on customized views that made extending the present codebase troublesome and required time-consuming testing strategies that slowed the event course of. Clue’s codebase had moreover amassed UI inconsistencies from hard-coded theme values equivalent to colours and sizes, and in 2022 Clue’s engineers acknowledged that they wanted a extra environment friendly and versatile answer. They finally landed on migrating to Jetpack Compose, Android’s trendy toolkit for constructing native UI.
“We determined {that a} full rewrite of the applying, with a particular emphasis on the UI layer, can be the perfect plan of action,” stated Moctezuma Rojas, an Android developer at Clue. “This choice was based mostly on the truth that it will allow us to have a extra environment friendly and sooner growth cycle, rapidly implement options that may have taken for much longer to develop utilizing views, and make our code extra testable.”
Constructing a sooner and extra environment friendly codebase with Compose
The Clue group noticed fast advantages by rewriting its app with Compose. For one, a sooner, extra environment friendly testing and growth cycle considerably decreased the effort and time essential to enhance the codebase whereas decreasing bugs and errors. Compose additionally enabled Clue’s engineers to implement options sooner than they might with Views.
Migrating the app to Compose resulted in improved testability for screens, sooner growth from ideation to launch, and higher standardization processes that aligned with the perfect practices advisable by Android developer sources. Compose additionally helped the Clue group double—and in some instances, triple—their growth velocity when in comparison with the previous codebase.
“With the standard view system, including new options, visible representations, or consumer interactions was troublesome as a result of want for customized view creation and upkeep. Nevertheless, by using Jetpack Compose, we have been capable of effortlessly develop and increase the Cycle View characteristic with none limitations in including parts,” stated Moctezuma.
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Compose additionally helped Clue’s builders rapidly overhaul a number of different vital options throughout the utility, together with Calendar View, Evaluation View, and the account administration and settings screens.
Extra creativity made potential with Compose
Compose enabled builders to make Clue screens extra intuitive, enhance scrolling, and deploy a customized colour system and part library that aligned with the model—an enormous win for the group. Beforehand, including new options, visible representations, or consumer interactions was sophisticated as a result of they required making a customized view and ongoing upkeep.
Compose APIs made it a lot simpler to check UI so Clue builders felt extra assured about what they have been delivery to customers. As an additional benefit, Clue builders now have more room for exploring UX innovation.
“The customized dynamic theming permits designers to freely discover their creativity with out being restricted by technological constraints,” stated Moctezuma. “It offers a versatile and scalable strategy to styling that may be simply tailored as our app evolves and grows, leading to a visually interesting and cohesive consumer expertise.”
All of those modifications vastly improved the consumer expertise for Clue subscribers, leading to fewer error messages and bug reviews. The Clue group additionally says that utilizing Compose has enabled them to determine areas of enchancment within the app’s code that would have doubtlessly impacted its customers.
“Compose will increase developer velocity by eliminating boilerplate code, works seamlessly with the present code base due to its Interoperability APIs, and improves UI testing—which has at all times been painful in Android growth,” stated Tilbe Saltan, a senior Android developer at Clue.
Continued success with Jetpack Compose
Compose has improved every subsequent app launch and made preview and reside enhancing options extra dependable for Clue engineers, permitting for a extra versatile growth expertise from begin to end. Since implementing Compose, the Clue group has additionally seen pleasure from potential candidates focused on engaged on the app to allow them to work with extra trendy growth applied sciences.
“The way forward for Compose holds many potential growth areas that would profit builders and corporations. As Compose continues to evolve, we are able to count on to see extra enhancements in efficiency, stability, tooling, and cross-platform assist, which can make it an much more compelling selection for constructing high-quality UIs,” stated Tilbe.
