AniTime started as a jailbreak tweak I made for iOS. It put animated pixel-art girls on the iPhone clock, one girl per digit. In January I started rebuilding it as an Android home screen widget. The first Android version was a paid app at $1.59. It got about 10 downloads. Here's what I've learned since: Android widgets can't run their own animation loop. A widget is a RemoteViews, which only allows a short list of view types. The trick that works is ViewFlipper: I turn each girl's GIF into a layout of frames and the launcher flips through them itself. The app only wakes up once a minute (an alarm) to swap the digits, so it doesn't need a foreground service or a notification. Paying upfront for a widget nobody has heard of is a tough sell, even at $1.59. I made it free with a 48 hour trial of the animation. After the trial it stays a still clock, still free, and a one-time unlock brings the animation back. The code was the easy part. My short videos get a few hundred views on YouTube Shorts and literally zero on TikTok, which I'm still trying to figure out. Play Store: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.yan.android.anitime to answer questions about widgets, Play Billing or how the trial works. If you've run a free-trial-then-unlock app, I'd like to know how your conversion turned out.   submitted by   /u/yzbeats [link]   [comments]