Developers for adidas CONFIRMED build features 30% faster using Jetpack Compose

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Posted by Nick Butcher – Product Manager for Jetpack Compose, and Florina Muntenescu – Developer Relations Engineer

adidas CONFIRMED is an app for the brand’s most loyal fans who want its latest, curated collections that aren’t found anywhere else. The digital storefront gives streetwear, fashion, and style enthusiasts access to adidas’ most exclusive drops and crossovers so they can shop them as soon as they go live. The adidas CONFIRMED team wants to provide users a premium experience, and it’s always exploring new ways to elevate the app’s UX. Today, its developers are more equipped than ever to improve the in-app experience using Jetpack Compose, Android’s modern declarative toolkit for building UI.

Improving the UX with Jetpack Compose

adidas CONFIRMED designers conduct quarterly consumer surveys for feedback from users regarding new app flows and UI enhancements. Their surveys revealed that 80% of the app’s users prefer animated visuals because animations encourage them to explore and interact with the app more. adidas CONFIRMED developers wanted to implement new design elements and animations across the app’s interface to strengthen engagement, but the app’s previous View-based system limited their ability to create engaging UX in a scalable way.

“We decided to build dynamic elements and animations across many of our screens and user journeys,” said Rodrigo Represa, an Android engineer at adidas. “We had an ambitious list of UI updates we wanted to make and started looking for solutions to help us achieve them.”

Switching to Compose allowed adidas CONFIRMED developers to create features faster than ever. The improvement in engineering efficiency has been noticeable, with the team estimating that Compose enables them to create new features roughly 30% faster than with Views. Today, more than 80% of the app’s UI has been migrated to Compose.

“I can build the same feature with Compose about 30% faster than with Views.” — Rodrigo Represa, Android engineer at adidas

Innovating the in-app experience

As part of the app’s new interface update, adidas CONFIRMED developers created an exciting, animated experience called Shoes Tournament. This competition positions different brand-collaborator sneakers head to head in a digital tournament where users vote for their favorite shoe. It took two developers only three months to build this feature from the ground up using Compose. And users loved it — it increased the app’s weekly active users by 8%.

UX screen of shoe tournament. Top shoe is clicked. Text reads: It took adidas' Android devs only 3 months to build this feature from the ground up using Compose.

Before transitioning to Compose, it was hard for the team to customize the adidas CONFIRMED app to incorporate branding from its collaborators. With Compose, it’s easy. For instance, the app’s developers can now create a dynamic design system using CompositionLocals. This functionality helps developers update the app’s appearance during collab launches, providing a more appealing user experience while maintaining a consistent and clean design.

One of the most exciting animations adidas CONFIRMED developers added utilized device sensors. Users can view and interact with the products they’re looking at on product display pages by simply moving their devices, just as if they were holding the product in real life. Developers used Compose to create realistic lighting effects for the animation to make the viewing experience more engaging.

An easier way to build UI

Using composables allowed adidas CONFIRMED developers to reuse existing components. As both the flagship adidas app and the adidas CONFIRMED app are part of the same monorepo, engineers could reuse composables across both apps, like forms and lists, enabling them to implement new features quickly and easily.

“The accelerated development with Compose provided our team of seven with more time, enabling us to strike a healthy balance between delivering new functionalities and ensuring the long-term health and sustainability of our app,” said Rodrigo.

Compose also helped to improve app stability and performance for the team. They noticed a significant reduction in app-related crashes, and have seen virtually no UI-related crashes, since migrating the app to Compose. The team is proud to provide a 99.9% crash-free user experience.

Compose’s efficiency not only accelerated development, but also helped us achieve our business goals.” — Rodrigo Represa, Android engineer at adidas

A better app built with the future in mind

Compose opened doors to implementing new features faster than ever. With Compose’s clean and concise usage of Kotlin, it was easy for developers to create the ambitious and engaging interface adidas CONFIRMED users wanted. And the team doesn’t plan to stop there.

The adidas CONFIRMED team wants to lean further into its new codebase and fully adopt Compose moving forward. They also want to bring the app to new screens using more of the Compose suite and are currently developing an app widget using Jetpack Glance. This new experience will provide users with a streamlined feed of new product information for an even more efficient user experience.

“I recommend Compose because it simplifies development and is a more intuitive and powerful approach to building UI,” said Rodrigo.

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