Paywalls are the critical touchpoint between your app and revenue. While pre-built templates can get you started quickly, there are compelling reasons to build custom paywalls that match your brand identity and create memorable user experiences. An animated paywall that responds to user context, like one that transitions between day and night themes, can create an emotional connection that static templates simply cannot achieve. The psychological impact of a well-crafted paywall extends beyond mere aesthetics; it signals to users that your app is polished, professional, and worth their investment.
In this article, you’ll explore how to build sophisticated animated paywalls in Jetpack Compose. We’ll dive deep into a “Day & Night” paywall implementation, examining each animation technique step by step. You’ll also learn how to use Firebase for agile A/B testing of your custom paywall content, and discover when RevenueCat’s Paywall Builder might be the better choice. By the end, you’ll have a complete understanding of when and how to build custom paywalls that convert.
Building custom paywalls: Day & Night deep dive
Let’s examine a production-quality animated paywall that transitions between day and night themes on a 16-second cycle. This implementation demonstrates several advanced Compose animation techniques working together harmoniously. The paywall creates an immersive environment that changes dynamically, with the sun rising and setting, stars twinkling into view, clouds drifting across the sky, and UI elements adapting their colors to match the time of day. This continuous cycle captures attention and creates emotional engagement that static paywalls cannot achieve.
Architecture overview
The Day & Night paywall follows a layered architecture that separates concerns cleanly. At the foundation sits the DayNightBackground composable, which handles all environmental animations including the sky gradient transitions, the procedurally generated star field with individual twinkling behaviors, the sun and moon following arc trajectories across the sky, a parallax cloud layer that drifts continuously, and a landscape gradient that grounds the scene.
Above this animated background, the content overlay presents the actual paywall information: a greeting that crossfades between “GOOD MORNING” and “GOOD EVENING” based on the cycle, a feature list with animated checkmarks whose colors shift with the day/night state, price display with an animated accent color, and a call-to-action button that transitions between warm golden tones during the day and cool indigo at night.
This layered architecture provides several benefits. The background animation logic remains isolated from the content presentation, making both easier to modify independently. The background can be reused in other contexts if needed, and the content layer can be updated without touching the complex animation code. This separation also improves performance by allowing Compose to optimize recomposition independently for each layer.
Setting up the animation cycle
The entire paywall is driven by a single cycleProgress value that loops from 0 to 1 over 16 seconds. This duration was chosen carefully, long enough to appreciate the transitions without feeling rushed, but short enough that users experience the full cycle during a typical paywall viewing session:
This pattern is important for complex animations: use a single progress value as the source of truth, then derive all other animations from it. This ensures perfect synchronization and makes the animation easy to reason about. When multiple animations need to coordinate, as they do in this paywall, having a single driver eliminates timing drift and makes the relationship between elements explicit.
The LinearEasing choice is deliberate. For a continuous cycle representing time passing, linear progression feels most natural. Non-linear easing would make certain parts of the day feel faster or slower than others, which would break the metaphor. The RepeatMode.Restart ensures the cycle loops seamlessly from midnight back to sunrise.
The cycle splits into two phases. The day phase spans from 0.0 to 0.5, during which the sun rises, crosses the sky, and sets. The night phase covers 0.5 to 1.0, when th