What to use for animating app for iOS

What animation program do most developers or designers use for adding animations to their apps?

I am a graphic/UI designer and have been working with XCode lately to develop an app. I would like to add animations to buttons, menus, and even full blown instructional animations for the user on how to use our products. I have used CoreAnimator, Adobe Animate and struggled with both. Adobe animate has issues with sizing for different devices and I have been working with them for months now trying to resolve the issue as it doesn't seem to be the constraints in Xcode.

I am not the best at coding but I am willing to learn. Do I need to learn Core Animation code to be able to animate buttons menus etc? Or are libraries easier?

As for the full blown instructional animations I feel like that would be more a long the lines of something similar to Adobe Animate?

TIA!

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SummerDesigner
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  • Which UI framework are you using? UIKit or SwiftUI? I have no knowledge of Adobe Animate, but you may need to learn and find what would be the iOS way of animating. Learning Core Animation APIs will help you constructing animations, but in most simple cases, using animations in iOS apps is far more simple. You can find many tutorials or guides searching with "ios animation". Or to get more specific results, "ios uikit animation" or "ios swiftui animation". Better try one of them and post more specific issues you experience.

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    OOPer

  • What type of animation do you look for ? Flash button, color change, size change, morphing effects ? All those are very easy to do with UIView.animate(withanimate(withDuration:animations:). Or are you looking for more sophisticated ones ?

    —
    Claude31
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You may want to check out "Lottie" - an open source framework for easily adding animations created externally into mobile apps on iOS. Lottie is sponsored by AirBnB and seems to have an active community and some high profile apps that utilize it

"In the past, building complex animations for Android, iOS, and React Native apps was a difficult and lengthy process. You either had to add bulky image files for each screen size or write a thousand lines of brittle, hard-to-maintain code. Because of this, most apps weren’t using animation — despite it being a powerful tool for communicating ideas and creating compelling user experiences. One year ago, we set out to change that. Today, we’re happy to introduce our solution. Lottie is an iOS, Android, and React Native library that renders After Effects animations in real time, and allows native apps to use animations as easily as they use static assets."

https://airbnb.io/lottie/#/

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iosdev
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