Lottie Animation with Brandon Withrow and Gabriel Peal

Animations make an application more fun and engaging. For most apps, animation is an afterthought. Developers are concerned with getting the functionality right, and designers have enough work to do simply getting icons, text formatting, and page layout correct.

There is also the issue of cross-device compatibility. iOS, Android, and web have different ways of doing animation, with no unifying standard–except gifs, and gifs are not interactive, they simply play from start to finish.

Airbnb’s emphasis on design makes it the right company to work on the problem of cross-device, interactive animations. Brandon Withrow and Gabriel Peal are engineers who work on Lottie, a library for animations in iOS, Android, web, and React Native.

This episode is about how and why Lottie was built, and how Lottie gets used within Airbnb.