Lottie for Android, iOS, React Native, and Web
airbnb.io
airbnb.io
The real long term alternative on Android is that Bodymovin now has a plugin to directly export an animation to the VectorDrawable format. So you get the advantage of running on the RenderThread while still being able to work directly in AfterEffects.
Of course there are other options .. If Google were to open up a RenderThread api, lottie could potentially be just as efficient (although I fear how some devs will abuse this api). Or maybe AVD will get dynamic properties and progress setting.
No matter who does it first, the future is bright !
The only downside I can think of :
- you really need to sit down with your animators and explain to them which effects they can use and which ones they need to avoid. Some manipulations will allocate a bitmap at each frame, it ends up very choppy
- some lottie json can take a while to read. In some cases we just handed up coding the animation by hand because it was not that complicated and better than to have to wait 1 or 2 seconds for it to load. It does not sounds that long, but it makes a big difference between immediately starting when your screen opens and starting with an empty screen then an animation blinks in.
Some are also trial and errors. Sometimes simple animations create jsons that take ages to load. If you can't preload them you might need to randomly tune the animation or go into the json yourself in order to end up with something more svelte.
> Let us know what you think of the intro hero animation. That was the part built in Lottie. [1]
From the tooltip on the page:
> This site was built entirely with Webflow — minus most of the hero introduction, which we built in After Effects and integrated on the page using Lottie. We wrote custom code to sync the Lottie playback with the Webflow IX2 animations in the hero, and uploaded the Lottie animation via a feature we’re testing internally to upload files (JS, SVG, etc) to Webflow sites.