How Pairly Built 40+ Animated Canvas Backgrounds That Run Smoothly on Old Phones

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A developer built 'Atmosphere', an animated Canvas background system for the app Pairly, featuring over 40 real-time visual effects ranging from snow and fireflies to a black hole accretion disk. The system is packaged internally as @pairly/atmospheres and uses two shared rendering engines — ParticleCanvas for particle-based scenes and useCanvasLoop for continuous hand-drawn animations. To protect low-end devices, the engines centralize performance safeguards such as capped frame rates, tab-visibility pausing, and support for the OS-level prefers-reduced-motion setting. The atmosphere picker grid avoids running multiple simultaneous Canvas loops by substituting lightweight CSS keyframe animations as previews instead. This architecture ensures individual atmosphere modules never need to handle device optimization themselves, keeping the codebase modular and battery-friendly.

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