Programs for designing animations

Unfortunately all popular 2D animation design software is hamstrung by archaic legacy design and/or peculiar, task specific use cases governing their user experience design.

This is not just the case with 2D animation software, it's also the case for all 2D creative software.

So the first step to success is removing all expectations of modern user experience considerations within design software.

Design software has not been designed.

That's the great irony.

In answer to your question:

The most guilty of these crimes against users is the most popular, Adobe's After Effects.

To understand why it's so horrid for Motion Graphics (this is the term used to describe creation of most animations) it must be remembered this app was born to do compositing of video, not Motion Graphics. Its abilites with animation were addons to make it more marketable, not done out of love, consideration or passion for motion graphics.

Apple makes an app called Motion which, in many ways, is a GUI for Core Image filter technologies. But it's a horrid GUI, and there's very little good learning materials out there to get you over the hump of their very strange mishmash of ideas for UI and UX. It is a blend of the worst things about After Effects and the odd way unmonitored Apple programmers might surface access to features in an API without thinking about user experience.

Apple's Motion does not have an accurate, stable, 60fps preview capability. It wonders in framerate from low 20's to high 50's, never attaining a stable 60fps playback, even in the simplest scene on the most powerful hardware. It is fundamentally flawed for previewing your creations at 60fps. Which, for game/animation design is so horrid as to make it useless.

The workaround, suggested for many years, is to render the animations to a video file, open that in quicktime, and preview there, before continuing to edit. This would have been completely unacceptable in 1995. How it exists as a problem today is anyone's guess. It is such a hateful experience I can't possibly recommend using this app for motion graphics design.

The latest After Effects has a "live" preview that holds 60fps when you're doing nothing, and permits updating/editing of values affecting the animation whilst it runs. It stutters and stalls while you edit values, and then continues looping your animation at 60fps. Despite the NIGHTMARE that is After Effects UI/UX, this feature is worthy of consideration for rapidly iterating through values to find that magic animation timing.

After Effects is free for a month, then $20 a month after that.

It is a NIGHTMARE for even the most primitive of scaling and animation, and will take all your patience to learn and grin through its arcane, archaic and nonsensical UI/UX. You will reconsider Xcode a well designed app after any amount of time in After Effects.

The sad truth... if you want to make animation well, easily, you need to master a 3D design application, as they have infinitely better UIs and paradigms for creation and control of animation. They have a learning curve, no doubt, but it's a sensible one, in nearly all cases.

The most popular (on a Mac) is C4D, and it has very sensible ways to create and control, edit and preview 2D animations in a 3D space. And is probably the most accessible of all the 3D animation apps.

Do not be tempted to try Blender because it's free. It is the only app on earth that makes Adobe apps look well designed and user friendly. It's that bad.

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Drawing pictures won't be easier on a computer. It's actually more difficult than using a pencil and paper because nobody has designed any of the design software that's available, only surfaced (through archaic tools) the maths that creates lines on a screen. Adobe Illustrator is the market king, and the very worst of them. Kind of like how C++ is the dominant programming language.