The Android app¶
Vistilla for Android: your library, the player, comments, transcripts and summaries, sharing, and recording with the camera or the screen. It uses the same account and the same videos as the website.
Install it¶
- On the phone, open the website and tap Get the Android app, under the sign-in card (signed in, it is at the foot of the library's side bar), or open vistilla.sylergy.workers.dev/assets/app/vistilla.apk. Either way you get the newest version; the button shows its number and size.
- Open the downloaded vistilla.apk. Android asks whether your browser may install apps: allow it once (Settings → Install unknown apps).
- Press Install, then Open, and sign in with your Vistilla email and password.
The app is free and is not in the Play Store, so Android shows a warning before installing it. It needs Android 8 or newer.
Updates¶
When a newer version is on the site, the library shows a New version
card in the brand colours: the version number, what changed as ticked
lines, and one wide Update now button, which gives way to a progress bar
while it downloads. It downloads it and opens Android's installer; press
Install. The first time, Android asks to allow Vistilla to install apps.
Updating keeps you signed in. There is never a need to uninstall: opening a
newer vistilla.apk from the browser updates the app too.
What it does¶
| Screen | What you can do |
|---|---|
| Tours | The ? button on the library, a video, the recorder and settings plays that screen's tour; it never starts by itself. The screen dims and lights one real control at a time, and a card says what it does in a sentence or two, with Back, Next (then Done) and Skip; the phone's Back key closes it. Each tour shows only what you can see or do. |
| Library | Above the recordings, a switch shows them as large cards, a grid of two, or a list (a small picture beside the title); the phone remembers it. A round Sort button before it orders them (newest or oldest first, by name A to Z or Z to A, longest or shortest first, most viewed), remembered too. At the top, the team's name as the page's title, painted in its colour, with the open channel as a tag under it. The moon (or sun) at the top switches the app between light and dark, remembered on the phone; until it is used, the app follows the phone's setting, as the website does. Colours follow the open team's colour, with Vistilla's teal for a team without one: the buttons, and the page's background and its glow, in light and dark alike. Tap a recording to open it; hold it, or tap its ⋯, for the same menu as a right-click on the website: Open, Rename, Choose image (a picture from the phone for its card and poster), Move to channel, Move to collection, Take out of its collection and Delete (the changes only for its uploader or whoever runs the channel). Switch team from the card at the top: a menu lists each team with its badge and its channels (the open one ticked), then Team color (owners and admins) and Manage teams and channels, which opens Settings. Under All, the channel's collections come first, as folders with their picture, name and count; a recording in a collection shows only inside its folder. Tap one to open it; its owners hold it (or tap its ⋯) for Choose image (a picture from the phone) and Remove image. Search (below), filter by collection or "Recorded by me", make a collection, see the storage used, pull down to refresh. |
| Search | The search field on the library opens the same search as the website's Ctrl K: it looks through every team you belong to, by title, description, tag, what was said and what was commented, with the words found marked. A match on something said or a comment shows Said or Comment with its time, and opens the recording at that moment. With nothing typed it shows your latest recordings; Go to offers Record a video, Library, Notifications, Settings and How Vistilla works. |
| Record | Record yourself with the front or back camera (pause, resume, and switch camera even while recording: it carries on in the same video), or record the phone's screen with your voice, or Camera + screen: the screen with you in a round camera bubble floating over it, as on the website (drag it anywhere; tap it to switch camera). For the bubble, Android asks once to let Vistilla display over other apps, and offers to share the entire screen only: a recording of one app leaves out the bubble, which is Vistilla's. Blur private areas (a switch, for Screen and Camera + screen, as on the website): recording waits while you place frosted boxes over what must stay private, in the app you are about to show: drag a box to move it, drag its round corner to resize it, ✕ removes it, ＋ on the small dock at the screen's edge adds one, then ● Start (on the dock, or in Vistilla) records. While recording the boxes are locked: nothing is drawn on them and taps go through them to the app underneath; ✎ on the dock unlocks them to move (then ✓), ■ stops. The dock can be dragged up or down. They are near-opaque frosted glass (blurred behind as well on Android 12 and later), so nothing under them can be read or recognised. They need display over other apps and the entire screen. Watch it back, give it a title, and press Publish. A stopped screen recording waits for you until it is published or discarded: however the app is opened next, even after Android closed it, it opens on that recording. |
| Upload | The small button above Record picks a video from the phone. Any app's Share → Vistilla sends a video too. |
| Uploads | The video's card shows a ring with the percentage, the size sent, the speed and the time left (also in the notification shade, so you can leave the app). Cancel, at the card's top corner, stops it and deletes what was sent. An upload that stops gets a card of its own saying why. |
| Video | The player, drawn like the website's, edge to edge across the screen with its bar under the picture rather than over it (in full screen the bar floats over the picture and steps aside while playing): a round play button, a frosted bar with the time, captions, speed, the sound (tap the speaker and a thin teal slider slides open beside it, as on the website) and full screen (upright or sideways, the way you hold the phone; turning the phone sideways goes full screen by itself, and turning it back upright leaves it, without the video restarting; leaving full screen while sideways stands the page back up until the phone is held upright), and a line with a red pin per comment; drag it to move. Tap the picture to play or pause; double-tap the right side to jump 5 seconds on, the left 5 back. Pinch the picture with two fingers to zoom in (up to 5×) or out; while zoomed, drag it with one finger to look around, and in full screen the bar steps aside until the picture is back to its size (on the page, where the bar sits under the picture, it stays). Then chapters, one emoji reaction per person (yours is outlined; tap it again to take it back; held, it swells, and a tap bursts it with its own little movement, as on the website), video replies as cards to play, chapters the owner holds to remove, comments taken off their moment with Unpin (the author, the owner or an admin), the link buttons for viewers with their sites' logos (the owner edits them with Links; they also show when the video ends), the owner's tools on a row of their own under the uploader, each named under its icon: Rename, Image (a picture from the phone for the video's card and poster), Move (to another channel), Links, Cut (drag the two ends, or Start here / End here at the moment playing, then Cut: the start and the end are cut off for good, as the website's ⋯ → Cut the video does), Insights, Share and Delete, sliding sideways on a narrow phone, comments pinned to a moment with replies and reactions (the box to write in stays hidden until you tap Comment at … at the bottom, or Reply on a comment; it then rests on the keyboard over the page, and ✕, a tap above it or Back closes it). The picture button in that box adds up to four pictures from the phone (each previewed, with × to drop it; a comment can be pictures alone), shown small in the thread, full screen at a tap. The camera button in that box records a video reply (up to 3 minutes, front or back camera; watch it back, then Post reply or Record again): a new comment at the moment the video is at, or, from Reply, an answer to that comment, as the website's Reply with video does. Under each comment its reactions, then one row of small icon buttons: React, Reply, Resolve, and Pin here or Unpin, the transcript that follows the video, and the AI summary with its topics map (the video by topic, the playing one lit, a card per topic saying what was said; tap one to play it), key moments and action items. The whole page moves as one, the player with it: push up anywhere and the video, title, reactions and chapters slide away so the comments, transcript or summary get the whole screen (the video keeps playing); pull down at their top and they come back. If a load or a jump fails, the player tries again from the same moment. A recording the server has not finished indexing cannot be jumped in yet; the app says so. |
| Owner's buttons | Rename, Insights (views, how far people watched, where they commented, who watched), Share (a public link to copy or send, and personal links by email) and delete. |
| Activity | The same notifications as the bell on the website. Tapping one about a comment (a comment, a reply, a mention) opens the video on its Comments tab, scrolled to that comment's thread, which glows for a moment, and plays from its moment; a link to a comment in an email (?comment=) opens the same way. |
| Settings | Your photo (cut to a square) and your name; your teams, each with its badge and its channels under it (tap a channel to manage it below; ✎ renames a channel, New channel under a team adds one (its owners and admins), New team at the bottom starts a team of your own; a bin deletes a team for its owner, never their last, or a channel for whoever may, never a team's last, each after asking); Storage, the team's space used and free; the channel's People (anyone can leave, an admin removes others, a channel's only owner neither); Invite someone for the channel's admins (by email, as a member; if the email cannot go, the link is copied) with the invitations waiting (Copy, Revoke); Transcripts and summaries for a team's admins (provider, key, Save, Test, as on the website); the channel's Collections (a bin, for their owner, deletes one after asking; its recordings stay); Documentation (opens these pages); Language (English or Arabic, the whole app at once, right to left in Arabic; also on the sign-in screen); Dark mode; sign out. |
Links to a Vistilla video (…/v/…) can open in the app.
Good to know¶
- Screen recording asks Android for permission each time; a notification with Stop stays up while it records. Only the microphone is recorded, not the sound of other apps.
- Recordings made on the phone are MP4, so they are smaller than the website's WebM and play everywhere.
- A big upload goes in 16 MB parts, each tried up to four times, so a short loss of signal does not stop it.