Animations can breathe life into an app, making it more engaging and intuitive for the user.
But if youre new to React Native animations, getting started can be a bit daunting.
Explore React Native animations and find out how you might begin creating beautiful, smooth animations.
How Do Basic React Native Animations Work?
Animations can create smooth transitions between different screens or elements.
They can highlight information or provide feedback on user actions.
React Natives portability makes it well worth usingif youre targeting several platforms.
One of its strongest features is the ability to create beautiful animations for mobile apps.
For example:
This code renders a blue box that moves downwards every second.
The animation works by using theuseEffecthook to create a timer that updates theboxPositionstate variable every 1 second.
While this may work in some situations, this is not the best option to go with.
State updates in React Native work asynchronously, but animations rely on synchronous state updates to work correctly.
They are several animation libraries like theAnimatedlibrary,react-native-reanimated, andreact-native-animatablefor building performant animations in React Native.
Each of these animation libraries squashes the issue of asynchronous state updates and is perfectly ideal.
The React Native Animated API
Animated is an API that React Native provides.
you’re free to use it to create smooth animations that respond to user interactions or state changes.
you’re able to then update these values over time using various animation methods.
The styles of your components will then update as the animated values change, resulting in smooth animations.
Animated works really well with React Native’s layout system.
The animated value is similar to a state value in a React component.
TheanimatedValuedrives the animation, and it changes value over 500 milliseconds.
This will create an animation that gradually fades in theViewcomponent as the animated value changes from 0 to 1.
Understanding Animation Types
Understanding the animation types and how they work is important for creating good animations.
Using theuseNativeDriveroption with Animated improves performance.
This option lets you offload animations to the native UI thread.
It can significantly improve performance by reducing the amount of JavaScript processing required.
However, not all animation types support the native driver.
Trying to use the native driver with animations that involve color or layout changes may cause unexpected behavior.
The Animated API provides a flexible and performant way to create both simple and complex sequence animations.
