Examples on the market

We all probably use great apps that are built only using the standard Android UI widgets and layouts, but there are many others that have some custom views that we don't know or we haven't really noticed. The custom views or layouts can sometimes be very subtle and hard to spot.

We'd not be the first ones to have a custom view or layout in our application. In fact, many popular apps have some custom elements in them. Let's show some examples:

The first example will be the Etsy application. The Etsy application had a custom layout called StaggeredGridView. It was even published as open source in GitHub. It has been deprecated since 2015 in favor of Google's own StaggeredGridLayoutManager used together with RecyclerView.

You can check it yourself by downloading the Etsy application from Google Play, but just to have a quick preview, the following screenshot is actually from the Etsy application showing the StaggeredGrid layout:

There are many other potential examples, but a second good example might be the electronic programming guide of Ziggo, one of the largest cable operators in the Netherlands. The electronic programming guide is a custom view rendering different boxes for the TV shows and changing color for what's ahead and behind current time.

It can be downloaded from the Dutch Google Play only, but anyway, the following screenshot shows how the application is rendering the electronic programming guide:

Finally, a third example and a more recently published application is Lottie from Airbnb. Lottie is a sample application that renders Adobe After Effects animations in real time.

Lottie can be downloaded directly from Google Play, but the following screenshot shows a quick preview of the application:

The rendering view and the custom font are examples of custom rendering. For more information about Lottie refer to:
http://airbnb.design/introducing-lottie/.

We've just seen some examples, but there are many more available. A good site to discover them or to see what is available is Android Arsenal:
https://android-arsenal.com/.