Hands-on with Motion Stills for Android [Video]

Motion Stills has been on the iOS App Store for over a year now, but today the popular GIF/video generator finally made its way to Android. On iOS, its primary function was to make Apple’s Live Photos easier to share across the web, but since Android phones don’t take Live Photos, this version is a little different.

The UI for Motion Stills is pretty clean and straightforward — so much so that Google doesn’t even give a tutorial screen introducing the app’s features. There’s a toggle to switch between the Motion Stills and Fast Forwards modes, a button to switch between your phone’s front and rear cameras, and a settings icon up top.

In Motion Stills mode, you can capture 3-second clips to export as videos or GIFs. It’s similar to Instagram’s popular Boomerang feature, and the app automatically applies stabilization to every capture for a smoother shot. If you don’t like the stabilization, you can easily disable it while previewing the clip, as well as the audio (though audio won’t matter if you’re exporting as a GIF anyway).

The stabilization is especially useful in Fast Forward mode, which lets you capture up to a minute of footage that can later be sped up by 2, 4, or 8x the original speed.

All captured clips reside in the white space beneath the viewfinder, and any footage you don’t like can easily be deleted by swiping to the left. Swiping right will add the clip to a timeline at the bottom of the screen, allowing you to create a montage of all your favorite footage.

Eventually Motion Stills will integrate with other services like Google Photos (presumably to import existing clips and sync new ones), but for now it’s a simple way to create quick GIFs for sharing on social media — where you’ll probably argue over the “correct” way to say “GIF.”