Airbnb wants to make it easier for developers to add animation to their native applications. The company is open-sourcing Lottie, a mobile library designed to render animations in real time. Lottie is available for iOS, Android and React Native.
“In the past, building complex animations for Android, iOS, and React Native apps was a difficult and lengthy process. You either had to add bulky image files for each screen size, or write a thousand lines of brittle, hard-to-maintain code. Because of this, most apps weren’t using animation — despite it being a powerful tool for communicating ideas and creating compelling user experiences,” wrote the Airbnb engineering team.
Lottie aims to remove the need to rewrite richer animations or build them from scratch. “With Lottie, digging through frameworks for reference, guessing durations, manually creating Bézier curves, and remaking animations with nothing more than a GIF for reference will be a thing of the past,” the team wrote.
Lottie supports solids, shape layers, masks, alpha mattes, trim paths and dash patterns, with new features being added on a regular basis. In addition, it allows developers to easily manipulate their animations and bund vector animations within their apps.
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