EasyFlipViewPager — The Flip Animations For Your ViewPager

A behind the scenes story of an open source Android library to create book & card flipping animations in ViewPager

The logo of EasyFlipViewPager Android Library

About 2 years ago, in January 2017, I released my first open source library EasyFlipView on Github. At that time, I was working on an English vocabulary type app for a client. One particular task was to create flashcards which had English word on one side and the meaning on other sides. I wanted to make it like a real card which can be flipped. A simple google search gave me plenty of easy code snippets and resources to create flipping animations and I put it in the app. The client loved it and I continued with the app development.

The demo of EasyFlipView library

After the project, I had an interesting encounter with another client. He indirectly motivated me to do open source contributions. I wanted to experiment it fast and put something on Github before my motivation fades away. And then this flipping animation hit me. It was almost ready. All I had to do was upload on jCenter and create a good ReadMe on Github.

It looked like easy but it was hell of a job. It took me days to finish and put in on Github. I didn’t know much about open source or how to market the library etc. But I did it. And I believe it was the beginner’s luck that the library started getting stars and forks. And quickly I crossed 500 stars. It was a crazy and amazing experience. And this made me addicted to the open source. I shared my experience in more details on this article.

But stars and forks are not the effective metrics for any open source Android library. These metrics tells the creator about other developers’ interest in the library. But the real metric is how much downloads it get and how many apps use it.