Google Motion Stills For Android Is Here: Why You Need It

Last year, Google launched an app called Motion Stills for iOS users. Motion Stills worked in tandem with the iPhone's Live Photos feature, turning them into shareable GIFs and stabilizing them in the process. Of course, with no such Live Photos feature on Android, the app stayed exclusive to iOS devices – until today, that is.

In a post to the Google Research Blog, the company announced today that Motion Stills will at last make its way to Android. It would appear that the lack of a Live Photos feature didn't stop Android users from requesting the app in droves, and today it arrives with a few tweaks to let those users make their own GIFs and short video clips with the touch of a button.

There are, ultimately, two ways to create a GIF or clip with Motion Stills. If you want to capture a short clip to use it as a GIF, you simply need to tap the record button and capture the action. If, on the other hand, you have a longer clip that you'd like to condense into a Motion Still, you can use the app's Fast Forward feature, which allows you to set a playback speed of up to 8x to pack even more footage into your GIF.

Google says that it has redesigned the streaming pipeline it used on iOS to allow Motion Stills to perform stabilization and loop optimization as the video is being recorded. The result is that you won't have to wait for your GIF to be created once you've captured the video that will feature in it. All of this done on the device itself, which means that you don't need to have an internet connect while you use Motion Stills.

Motion Stills is available now on the Google Play Store [download] for phones running Android 5.1 or later. Google additionally says that it may implement certain features from Motion Stills into larger apps (like Google Photos) as time goes on. If that sounds good to you, go download the app and use it so Google can continue to refine its creation process for short-form videos.