Lavender instead of indigo: a new face for Fake Chat Video

15 and 16 September 2026:

The colours did not come from the icon

The Fake Chat Video app icon is violet. The app itself was indigo on grey, and in places the lavender of the Material baseline palette crept in, because not every surface level had a colour of its own.

The new palette is derived from the icon, and this time every level is set, down to the last container surface. The dark version is no longer a neutral grey but aubergine: the same colour, only deep.

Before a line of code was written, the mockups existed as a clickable page and went back and forth for several rounds.

A bunch that sheds its florets

Behind the home screen sits a photo of a bunch of lavender. It is generated, not photographed, in front of a cyan background that could be keyed out cleanly later. It was cut out and trimmed in Python, leaving 66 KB of WebP with no brand on it anywhere.

Florets come loose from that bunch. The motion lives in a class of its own with no Android and no Compose, just numbers:

• Every floret starts at a flower head of the bunch.
• How far it travels is decided by the push it gets when it comes loose. After that, air drag pulls it towards the wind and its own falling speed.
• State lives in preallocated arrays. A frame allocates nothing.
• A fixed seed always produces the same picture, so the physics runs as an ordinary test on the computer.

It only draws while the screen is actually visible. In tests the picture stands still, and anyone who turned off animations in the system sees no motion either.

One trap in the drawing: every floret is a piece of the photo in the shape of a blossom. On an Android canvas the shape has to be drawn first and the photo into it. The other way round, photo first and the shape as a mask, everything outside the shape simply stays.

Three builds in one day

The first brought the colours and the lavender, but only on the home screen. Every other screen still looked like the old app.

The second carried the lavender everywhere. The top bars are transparent, the bunch sits there at bar height, and the florets are fainter, because they fall behind lists full of text. The moving background switch now works on every screen. Off means the florets disappear.

The third came because the florets lay on top of the text, and text with florets on it is hard to read. Settings, Pro and the intro now put their text on solid cards, with the florets flying behind. The studio is the other way round: the sheet under the stage is transparent, only chips, cards and input cover it.

Only the third went to users. It has been on Google Play for all devices since 16 September.

The new home screen

The chats now sit side by side as cards, with a real preview from the same renderer that draws the video, smaller and cached. Free users get a locked "New chat" card instead of a plus button.

Below that is the front chat in every style. One tap tries it in another style. That is quicker than any explanation of what the fifteen styles are.

There was some tidying along the way. The home screen was one file of 666 lines and is now three. The language picker moved out of the settings, which were 594 lines long.

The landscape format came along

1.0.10, with the landscape format for Pro, was already done but never left internal testing. 1.1.0 carries it.

The chat is not laid out wide. A phone screen in landscape would have bubbles a metre wide under a keyboard that eats half the height. Instead the chat is made in portrait at 608 by 1080 pixels and sits in the middle of the wide frame. The sides are filled with the same chat, shrunk down twice, blown back up and dimmed.

What else belongs to it

• 9 new strings and "What's new" in all 71 app languages, release notes in 86 Play languages.
• The "Pro just got cheaper" notice is gone, from 72 language files. The price has been the regular one since August; it is not news any more.
• 392 tests, all green.