Google unveiled an app called Motion Stills last year that allowed iPhone users to further refine their Live Photos by stabilizing images and turning them into actual GIFs. That was over a year ago and for its part, Apple will be rolling out a number of built-in tools for editing Live Photos in iOS 11, which kind of obviates the need for Motion Stills in the first place. Now Google has announced that they're finally rolling out Motion Stills for its own Android platform.
"With Motion Stills on Android we built a new recording experience where everything you capture is instantly transformed into delightful short clips that are easy to watch and share. You can capture a short Motion Still with a single tap like a photo, or condense a longer recording into a new feature we call Fast Forward. In addition to stabilizing your recordings, Motion Stills on Android comes with an improved trimming algorithm that guards against pocket shots and accidental camera shakes. All of this is done during capture on your Android device, no internet connection required!"
Google also states that they redesigned the video processing pipeline used in the iOS version to process each frame of a video as it is being recorded. By analyzing the "intermediate motion metadata", Motion Stills is able to immediately stabilize the recording while still performing loop optimization over the full sequence. This allows for the recording to be immediately shareable as a GIF.
Google says the new app is meant to be a place where they can continue to experiment and make improvements with short-form video technology; improvements that could make their way into Google Photos in the future. Motion Stills for Android is available in the Google Play store for free and works on Android 5.1 and higher.