Ty for the kind words! I completely agree with you too. Compose added a Crossfade modifier that makes it super easy to apply the animation to a content switch but it's often applied in the lazy way you mentioned.
Appreciate heads-up! I just checked Chrome on my Android device and it's all working fine for me. I don't know if I set the page up weirdly but I have to refresh the page sometimes for the videos to show up.
I've seen a few comments along the lines of wishing that the author had included examples of solutions. I wrote a very similar post recently that details both the issues with the animations, very similar to this article, as well as how I improved them.
Artists benefit hugely from the extra horsepower. My brother works in the animation industry and uses an ipad as his primary work device when travelling.
I was glad to see the discussion as well but it feels like the downsides were also very understated. Working on an RN app as a native dev requires a lot of cross-domain knowledge that isn't typical for a native dev.
Blazing fast is a bold claim. I use this app nearly every day on a brand new Pixel 9 Pro and, while much improved from a few years ago, it is far from "blazing fast".
For example, I just recorded myself tapping on a product in the Product list screen and the delay between the pressed state appearing and the first frame of the screen transition animation is more than half a second. The animation itself then takes 300ms which is a generally accepted timeframe for screen animations. But that half second where I'm waiting for the app to respond after I've tapped a given element is painful. UX studies indicate 0.1s as a number where an application no longer feels instantaneous. (https://www.nngroup.com/articles/response-times-3-important-...)
Contrast this against something like the Slack app where the screen is navigating even before the pressed animation has appeared. Or for an app with probably not as much engineering focus, Fastmail, which begins the screen transition within 100ms of the pressed animation state appearance.
That's not really a fair comparison. I don't think WebGL and SVG allow you to do the type of animation OP is referring to.
Furthermore, ConstraintLayout is a brand-new layout manager. Totally agree that there's bugs in it but nothing that could be called arcane knowledge. Do you have any examples for the actually arcane layout managers? Relative, Layout, etc?