Lottie Who?

The process of creating motion for mobile felt broken up until Airbnb released a stunning open source library called Lottie. Prior to then (Feb. 2017), creating complex mobile animations required an arduous back-and-forth between designers and developers.

Designers would create prototypes for developers who would have to either recreate them by hand in multiple languages (once for Android and once for iOS), or choose to embed large non-scaling GIFs or image sprites. But Lottie changed all of that, rendering intricate, scalable animations for both iOS and Android with the ease of including a static image. Swiftkey, for example, swapped out a .png sequence at 6mb in size for a Lottie .json of just 340kb. The pristine fidelity and download savings have an enormous impact on the user experience.