​Google's Motion Stills GIF-making app arrives on Android

Google has released Motion Stills for Android, a take on its iOS app for turning iPhone Live Photos into smooth GIFs for sharing on the web.

Google says Android fans have wanted an app for sharing smooth GIFs ever since it launched Motion Stills for iOS a year ago.

Rather than convert a clip into a Motion Still, Android users would take the shot from within the app itself, which processes it for sharing as a looping GIF or a video. Like Live Photos, the clip is three seconds long, though there's no still image in the file.

Google has also added a Hyperlapse-like feature called Fast Forward, which condenses up to a one minute video down to a shorter clip. The playback speed can also be adjusted between 1x to 8x after recording.

Motion Stills is available on Google Play for devices running Android 5.1 and up, meaning it supports about 66 percent of all Android devices in use today.

Google notes the app features an on-device trimming algorithm that prevents pocket shots and camera shakes. It's also redesigned the iOS video processing pipeline for video stabilization on Android, which uses the device's GPU during playback.

"For this release, we redesigned our existing iOS video processing pipeline to use a streaming approach that processes each frame of a video as it is being recorded. By computing intermediate motion metadata, we are able to immediately stabilize the recording while still performing loop optimization over the full sequence. All this leads to instant results after recording -- no waiting required to share your new GIF," Google said.

The Android version of Motion Stills arrives ahead iOS 11, which introduces Live Photo editing features that partly overlap with Motion Stills for iOS, such as a loop effect. It will also add long exposure effect, a bounce effect, and the ability to trim the video.