Android-Transitions

The Developers site released a training guide for UI related stuff, this is the index:

• Animations Overview
• Property Animation Overview
• Animate drawable graphics
• Reveal or hide a view using animation
• Move a View with Animation
• Move views using a fling animation
• Enlarge a view using a zoom animation
• Animate movement using spring physics
• Auto animate layout updates
• Animate layout changes using a transition
• Create a custom transition animation
• Start an activity using an animation

If you are interested in any of these, this is the link: https://developer.android.com/training/animation/

I found 5 ways to animate in Android:

1. Animate the properties of a View with Property Animation to smoothly change rotation, alpha, scale etc.

2. Frame Animations (AnimationDrawable): change the pictures quickly, so that it looks animated

3. Design the images with vectors (VectorDrawable) and animate them by editing them over time with AnimatedVectorDrawable.

4. Override onDraw() on a View and perform Custom Drawing by painting in the canvas.

5. Use Lottie, what reproduces animations from After Effects. Many animations available at LottieFiles.

However, Android provides some built-in tools too, such as Scenes (that let you animate the transition among several layouts that share the Views), Shared elements (that lets you make the ilussion of passing a View from one Activity to another one) etc.

Many (if not all) of these features were added in API 21, click here here for more information.

Here are some interesting articles/blogs on animation:

• A subcategory on a Google made website called material.io: Creative customization.

• How we design a beautiful animation: train animation with animated vectors.

• How Android Transitions work.

• Animating to infinity: bluetooth animation with vectors

• Frame Animations in Android: filling up a heart by images rotation.

Last, a couple interesting tools:

• Mac tool to record Android screen on GitHub.

• Video to GIF converter online.

I am aware Android provides transformations such as scale, alpha, rotate, translation etc.

There are 2 examples I would like to look at and compare.

For example, filling up a glass of water or drawing a path.

For instance, StackExchange App for Android, login screen animation (couldn't find a video on it, also, didn't check if behaves the same in iOS).

For the first example, I can't think of any other way than playing GIFs, or manually changing images after little time periods.

I do not think this is the case, that's why I would like to ask, (1) do you know how it's done?

Regarding the second example, only one idea came to my mind, and that's setting a Path and moving the View accordingly by passing it somehow after animate(). (2) Is this possible?

Apart from the mentioned above, (3) do you know of other techniques to play animations? (Such as Scene transitions - mentioned in an answer-)

Please share! Thank you.