Spotlight
An Android library for creating interactive tutorial spotlights that highlight UI elements with custom shapes and effects.
What is Spotlight?
Spotlight is an Android library that enables developers to create interactive tutorials and walkthroughs by highlighting specific UI elements with animated spotlights. It solves the problem of guiding users through app features with clear visual cues, enhancing onboarding and user engagement. The library provides customizable targets, shapes, and effects to fit various design needs.
Android developers building apps that require user onboarding, feature tutorials, or interactive guides. It's particularly useful for teams focused on improving user experience and reducing learning curves.
Developers choose Spotlight for its ease of integration, extensible architecture for custom shapes and effects, and smooth animations that create professional-grade tutorials without heavy dependencies.
Overview
Android Library that lights items for tutorials or walk-throughs etc...
Use Cases
Best For
- Creating step-by-step app onboarding tutorials
- Highlighting new features after app updates
- Building interactive product tours for complex UIs
- Guiding users through multi-screen workflows
- Adding visual cues to improve accessibility in tutorials
- Implementing custom animated walkthroughs for Android apps
Not Ideal For
- Projects built entirely with Jetpack Compose seeking native tutorial components
- Teams requiring server-controlled tutorials that update without app releases
- Apps where minimizing animation overhead is critical for performance
- Developers needing out-of-the-box analytics integration for tutorial tracking
Pros & Cons
Pros
Allows defining multiple targets with precise anchors, built-in shapes like Circle and RoundedRectangle, and custom overlays, enabling tailored tutorial experiences as shown in the Target.Builder example.
Supports custom shapes and effects through implemented interfaces (Shape and Effect), making it easy to create unique visual styles without modifying the core library, as demonstrated in the README with custom class examples.
Provides programmatic methods like next(), previous(), and show() for seamless step-by-step navigation, allowing developers to manage tutorial flow dynamically without complex state handling.
Attachable listeners for spotlight and target start/end events enable triggering specific actions at precise moments, such as showing toasts, improving responsiveness in tutorial sequences.
Cons
Requires waiting for views to be laid out before showing spotlights (e.g., using view.doOnPreDraw), adding boilerplate code and potential timing issues in dynamic or complex UIs, as noted in the usage section.
Built on traditional Android Views without native Jetpack Compose integration, forcing interoperability layers and making it less ideal for teams fully adopting Compose in their apps.
Creating advanced custom shapes or effects requires implementing interfaces and handling Canvas drawing logic manually, which can be time-consuming compared to libraries with more pre-built options.
Frequently Asked Questions
Found a gem we're missing?
Open-Awesome is built by the community, for the community. Submit a project, suggest an awesome list, or help improve the catalog on GitHub.