Bring Your App to Life: Add Dynamic, Organic Visuals with Shaders

In the world of app development, a new trend is emerging: companies are shifting away from the simple, flat user interface design we’re used to and are embracing dynamic, organic animations and visuals that set them apart from competitors. Apple’s recent innovations exemplify this trend, with fancy animations for Apple Pay and organic, dynamic visuals for Apple Intelligence. Similarly, Google has introduced a dynamic animated UI for the Gemini AI.

So what makes these visuals so special? The secret lies in shaders. Instead of staying in the boundaries of layouts and components that we generally follow, shaders allow high performance parallel pixel manipulation outside of these boundaries.

In this session, we will dive into the potential of parallel pixel manipulation and their use cases within modern app development. We’ll begin by covering the fundamentals: what shaders are, their primary use cases, and a brief introduction to writing shaders and integrating them into your applications.

Building on this foundation, we will explore how shaders can be incorporated into the user interface and functionality of your app. This includes applications such as AI-supported integrations, e.g. Apple Intelligence, as well as simple but visually appealing examples such as dynamic scrolling effects or interactive button animations.

With this knowledge, you’ll have everything in place to design and implement shader-based experiences within your app.