I’ve seen this happen especially with Lottie. And what basically happens here is the actual drawing isn’t actually handled by react-native since the library is itself a native view to either platform. Therefore, react-native has no idea it’s wasting any resources because it’s not technically “in charge” of what exactly the native view itself is doing. It certain scenarios where it might be “covered up”, such as all JavaScript based views (which are essentially just UIViews in iOS) then iOS itself also doesn’t know to stop this animation either (view compositing is quite popular).

However, if using something like native navigation, where view controllers and their life cycle get handled by iOS then it will correctly end an animation.

I have no idea if this is true for Android. But I have witnessed it on iOS and fixed this issue in react-native apps on quite a few occasions.

The ultimate downside to frameworks like this is they imo, don’t know enough about the content they’re showing to make great choices for users. But at the same time, it’s not fully desirable to attempt to assume. That’s the platforms job. And that’s an obvious catch-22. How should you know this if you aren’t a native app builder?