Hiding "no animations" for power users under accessibility is a great way to go.
I liked the end result a lot. The whole animation seems very appropriate in this case to me. The rant that I see in your comment (and every other comment here by the time I am writing this) seems very out of place. Everyone is complaining about things that are not what this designer did.
The point is - it doesn't matter how infrequent it is. If you don't allow disabling it, it's going to piss someone off.
> Here, it's three or four times a day?
Hell no. I'm not 6.
I've only glanced at this app, but the goal seems to be forming a habit of doing things once a day. If you're only interacting once every 24 hours, I'd take a 1second animation with some charm over a static checkbox.
Android for example has clearly a bunch of bugs where some stupid slow animations cannot be tured off. Yes even with turning off animations in accessibility and via the developper options.
On iOS, it doesn't seem to be possible to turn any of them off. You can merely "reduce motion". But it still wastes up to second in the worst case.
What about gtk3 or 4. Now there is some crap animation everywhere in gtk applications and I don't know how to turn that off.
Computers are so fast. Most software is already bad enough that it manages to slow down our beautiful hardware. Let's not make it even slower with animations.
Sure have optional animations if that helps newcomers understand better the flow of your application. But make it optional please. Pretty please?
I recently found out about Android's animation disable feature and holy hell it made my phone feel so much more snappy and responsive to input. But as you mentioned there are too many bugs - one of the more annoying ones is that loading wheels (which I would prefer to keep because you have to wait anyway) are not animated. I'm tempted to use it anyway. Hopefully in the future Android will add some sort of categorization/prioritization for animations so things can be tweaked more.
I may be in the minority here but I am kind of annoyed with how "juicing" the interface/experience seems to be kind of bleeding over into general applications from the game development scene. It does make sense for games and some apps but in general I don't need animations and tweens attached to every button on my phone.
Pretty sure this is due to the fact that being able to disable animations is usually done as an accessibility concern - for people who are motion sensitive it could be problematic to have loading bars etc.
I agree that the categorization of animations could be helpful. Or at least being able to limit it by app.
Turn on developer options on the phone (you find the OS build info in the settings and tap it something like 8 times).
Go into the new developer menu and go to the drawing section.
Set the following 3 items to 0.5
Window animation scale, Transition animation scale, animator duration scale
The end result is that all animations provided by the OS are running at twice the speed and it feels snappy while still allowing animations to do their job at hinting information.
I have the same rant about excessive animation in the user interface, and on reflection it is not exactly the animation that is the problem, sure, it is the exasperating factor, but the underlying problem is that you have removed the users control in favor of the animation, however, that being said, keeping the user in control requires an interruptible animation system, which requires more moving part and is harder to get right... probably for the best to just leave off the animation entirely.
So if an animation is a long rotation (like a loading indicator) it turns into a high frequency strobe light (Most loading animations are replaced by a static image, but not all)
It's infuriating.
Back in the day, the lock screen of the iPhones hand a physics based bounciness. When you slide the lock screen from the top it would slightly bounce at the bottom and if you accelerate the lock screen it would bounce more. I fidgeted with that all the time, I was sad when they removed that.
UIs become so boring, I hope and expect to get some skeuomorphism back. Our current devices are so capable that this time the skeuomorphic designs can be much more convincing.
I agree that making actions feel more rewarding is great, so adding some sound and maybe a bit of more design to the check box is great. One of the things I enjoy the most about my mechanical keyboard is the click that each keystroke makes.
But going all the way to create a 3D animation, that now takes seconds to go from unchecked to checked actually feels like making a daily process more time consuming and annoying.
(Or maybe I am just not human enough)
So the answer is somewhere in between and the optimal UX might only be achieved by adjusting for individual players, for example depending on their speed or for how they have played the game.
Remember, for a user centric app, the goal is for the user to use it AS LITTLE AS POSSIBLE. Not because it is frustrating to use but because it is efficient and you respect their time. Optimising for stickiness is user hostile.