The year is coming to an end, which means it’s a fantastic time to look back and sum up some of the best UI/UX libraries that has been made available to Android app creators. In this post, you will find my personal list of favourite libraries plus one or two websites that will definitely spice up your future project.
Why should you add Animations to your apps?
Before we jump right into it, here are some key reasons for taking your project to the next level with animations:
- Applications everywhere are becoming less static, and more developers are adding that perfect eye-capturing animation that will keep making people come back to their apps.
- One smooth animation could make the difference between people-friendly vs merely functional, so if your app doesn’t yet have that much functionality as it’s just starting out, this is all the more reason to integrate some animations that will keep people coming back for that delightful experience.
- Animations are key to reinforcing app interaction: people want to be informed when they have successfully completed some action. Nevertheless, you would still want to keep the animation to a golden medium – not under-doing it so it’s not noticeable to them, or over doing it to a stage where they might get distracted.
- Displaying an appropriate animation while the app content is loading could not only brighten up the app audience experience, but also make them more patient to wait while content is being loaded.
- Wanting to capture a person’s information is never an easy process, but adding a seamless, smooth transaction between the fields or pages will keep a person interacted, and wanting to continue the process till completion.
With the benefits and reasons of why you would want to enhance your apps UI/UX out of the way, shall we get started?
Lottie
Lottie is by far my favourite place to go to in order to check out any animations I want to add to my projects. What makes them so special is that they make use of Adobe After Effects animations, which means there is no need for us as developers to painstakingly recreate animations. They just use the animation file from Adobe and parse that as a simple to use JSON, which allows you to easily render them natively. What is even more impressive, since it’s a JSON file, it can be used in not only Android, but also iOS, React Native, Web and Windows.
Visit the Lottie GitHub and lottiefiles.com to check out all the cool animations that they make possible.
WoWoViewPager
WoWoViewPager combines ViewPager and Animations to provide a simple way to create application guide pages. It also supports some simple animations like translation, scale, alpha, background colour animations, and moreover, some complicated animations like gif-playing, svg-drawing and path-drawing animations with corresponding custom views.
EasyAndroidAnimations
With 50+ built-in animations, EasyAndroidAnimations empowers you to introduce many complex animation effects in your application with one or two lines of code. It is for this reason that this library is completely worth checking out and giving it a try – you just might find just the perfect animation for your app.
Zoom Recycler Layout
Zoom Recycler Layout is a beautiful zoom animation library for RecyclerView items in Android using Kotlin. It is an easy way to make your app stand out from the norm: not only is it practical and stunning, but it also leaves people wanting to see more, and will definitely have them return back to your app.
Motion Toast
Motion Toast is a beautiful multipurpose Toast library in Android using Kotlin. The library allows you to choose a UI as well as a dark mode setting, so it can meet all your app’s requirements while giving your app audience a surprisingly nice experience.
DeterminateProgressView
DeterminateProgressView is meant to be a customizable determinate progress view – like the standard Android indeterminate progress bar, but highly customisable. It is built with Kotlin and supports heavy customization options and a convenient way to animate progress automatically.
AnimatedBottomBar
AnimatedBottomBar is a customizable and easy to use bottom bar view with sleek animations. This library provides a unique animation to the way people navigate your app, and will get them wanting to explore your entire app just so they can see the additional animation and icons.
ThemedToggleButtonGroup
ThemedToggleButtonGroup is a highly modular lightweight toggle button library for Android. It can be configured for single selection or multi selection. For multi selection, the minimum/maximum amount of buttons that are required/enabled can be specified. Icons can be added. Selection includes a fun press and circular reveal animation.
ArcAnimator
ArcAnimator will help you to create arc transition animation. This library opens up the possibilities of custom animation inside your app, whether your goal is transition from bottom up, or top down, or even just a zoom in/out. With being able to set a custom path, you can make going between pages or completing tasks very fun for the app audience.
And that’s it! Remember, there are tons more UI/UX libraries out there, this is just a short list of some of my personal favourites. I hope you have found some inspiration, or some helpful libraries for your own app that you will go and try out.