The idea
Most apps give you a static background. I wanted Pairly to feel alive instead, so I built "Atmosphere": a real-time animated Canvas layer that sits behind every chat, fully tunable by the user, speed, density, opacity, brightness, saturation, all live. There are currently over 40 atmospheres in the system, from calm ones like Snow and Fireflies to more elaborate ones like a black hole accretion disk called Abyss.
The interesting part wasn't drawing pretty particles. It was making that work smoothly on a five-year-old Android phone without draining the battery in ten minutes.
Two rendering paths, not one
Atmosphere isn't a single renderer, it's a small internal package (@pairly/atmospheres) with two shared engines that every individual atmosphere builds on:
