Building text animations for Instagram Stories

This post details the development of new text styles and animations for Instagram Stories and Reels, highlighting the engineering challenges and solutions. Key contributions include: developing a custom solution for font delivery on Android using Everstore and Haystack to avoid increasing APK size; implementing dynamic text animations by collaborating closely with designers to overcome technical limitations, such as the 'Directional' text style; and solving complex text rendering issues on Android, including handling ligatures, emojis, RTL text, and custom spans for emphasis and selective coloring, by leveraging native APIs like TextPaint and BreakIterator.