FancyShowCaseView is an open-source Kotlin library for Android that draws a customisable show case overlay — a focus area revealed with a circular reveal animation and an optional title — so an app can point users at one specific view on screen.

What it is

FancyShowCaseView is a Kotlin Android UI library released under the Apache-2.0 licence and distributed through JitPack as com.github.faruktoptas:FancyShowCaseView:1.5.0. Its topics place it squarely in the Android interface ecosystem — android-library, android-ui, material-design, material-ui — and the project was picked by MaterialUp as "Best of the Day". The work it does is narrow and visual: it masks the screen, cuts a focus shape around a view or a coordinate, and reveals that shape with a circular reveal animation on API Level 21 and above, with support for a title, a border and custom enter and exit animations. The repository carries roughly 2,000 stars and 275 forks.

The concrete problem it solves is the show case overlay — the first-run hint, the feature announcement, the guided step that has to highlight one control while everything else is dimmed. Built by hand, that means an overlay view, a highlighted shape positioned over a target, title placement, touch handling and dismissal logic, repeated for every hint in the app. FancyShowCaseView replaces that hand-written overlay with a builder call: new FancyShowCaseView.Builder(this).focusOn(view).title("Focus on View").build().show();. It also provides the behaviour such overlays usually lack, including showOnce, chained sequences of overlays, pass-through touch zones and listeners for animation completion and dismissal.

Key capabilities

• The whole overlay is configured through FancyShowCaseView.Builder, which takes focusOn, title, backgroundColor, delay and closeOnTouch before build().show() displays it.
• Focus geometry is selectable: focusShape chooses a circle or a rounded rectangle, refined by focusBorderColor, focusBorderSize, focusDashedBorder and roundRectRadius (set to 0 for a plain rectangle).
• Position-based focus is available through focusCircleAtPosition (x, y, radius) and focusRectAtPosition (x, y, width, height) for targets that are not a view.
• Sizing is adjustable with focusCircleRadiusFactor and focusRectSizeFactor, while the pulsing focus animation can be tuned with focusAnimationMaxValue and focusAnimationStep or switched off with disableFocusAnimation.
• Presentation can be replaced entirely with customView, which takes precedence over the title and its properties, and motion can be replaced with enterAnimation, exitAnimation and animationListener.
• Touch behaviour is configurable through clickableOn, enableTouchOnFocusedView (false by default), closeOnTouch and dismissListener.
• Multiple FancyShowCaseView instances can be chained into a sequence, and showOnce restricts an overlay to a single appearance.

Who uses it and how

• Published Android applications already ship it: the README lists News – Newspaper & Magazine and NN Senin Mobilin as apps in use.
• First-run onboarding benefits from showOnce, which keeps a hint from returning on later launches.
• Feature announcements on a single control rely on focusOn plus the radius and size factors to frame the target precisely.
• Guided tours chain several instances across a flow, with fitSystemWindows set to true when the host root view uses that property.
• Integration is Gradle-based through JitPack, and the README's sample is written in Java, so the builder is callable from Java or Kotlin projects.

Getting started

Add the JitPack repository with maven { url "https://jitpack.io" } to the root build.gradle file rather than the module file, then add implementation 'com.github.faruktoptas:FancyShowCaseView:1.5.0' to the module's dependencies. Further samples are collected in the project wiki.

How it compares

The facts for this entry name no paid products that FancyShowCaseView replaces and no sibling tools in the same category, so it stands alone in this registry. The honest comparison is therefore build-versus-adopt: either assemble an overlay, focus shape, title and dismissal handling from Android views and animation code, or take the Apache-2.0 library and its builder API.

When to use it — and when not to

Choose it for an API Level 21 or higher Android app that needs to spotlight a control, because the circular reveal animation is only available from that level up. As a client-side view library there is no database, storage or mail service to operate, so the running cost is limited to keeping the JitPack dependency and Gradle configuration current. It is a poor fit if the app must support older API levels or non-Android platforms, and the documentation stops at the README property table and the wiki — nothing there covers analytics or remote configuration of tours — with 8 open issues on the tracker.

allprojects {
    repositories {
        ...
        maven { url "https://jitpack.io" }
    }
}

dependencies {
    implementation 'com.github.faruktoptas:FancyShowCaseView:1.5.0'
}

new FancyShowCaseView.Builder(this)
        .focusOn(view)
        .title("Focus on View")
        .build()
        .show();