This article is dedicated to the basics of animations in Flutter, read on to find out more about how to animate in Flutter to enhance your mobile app animation.
Why You Should Add Animations To Your App?
In case you’ve ever seen an animation-heavy video or used one, you’ll know that animation is really important for user experience. According to Forrester, 76% of customers would abandon an app that doesn’t have animation. A fully animated app can help you set your brand apart from others in the industry and can become your primary user experience.
What are Flutter Animations?
Flutter allows you to animate your app with reusable objects called Flutter Animations. They’re Flutter’s take on traditional, pre-rendered animations found in older platforms like Flash, HTML5, and canvas. Animations make user interfaces feel smooth and coherent with the rest of the design. Instead of reading static HTML, animating a browser URL, for example, helps users to get the most out of your app. Flutter Animations are built using the Flutter Render Library, so they are cross-platform.
How Does Flutter Allow You to Use Animations?
Animations can be added to your Flutter UI by using two collections of Flutter Templates: Stream and Animations. The Stream Template lets you add animation to your entire app or, alternatively, to a specific UI component. Animations can be added to a UI component by creating an instance of the Animations Collection. Flutter Elements are essentially models for your UI components, which contain state variables and methods that control and animate the component’s states and behavior.
The Animations Collection lets you create animations inside Flutter code. Using Animations, you can animate parts of a UI component or transition between states, and so on. The Animations collection lets you create your own animations in the style of your choice. Since they are customizable, you can animate them in your own way.
What can be Animated in Flutter?
The Stream Template is your primary animation library. However, you can also use the Animations Collection to create your own custom animations.
These are generally executed by calling a list of Renderer methods, which specify how to render the component to canvas, how to draw the view, etc.
How do animations work in Flutter?
In short, the rendering flow of Flutter Animation works much like that of a real animation film. Here’s the flow diagram of the flow:
- The renderer method is called each frame of a mobile UI and informs the UI component that the frame is done.
- The UI component handles the rendering of the view for the current frame.
- After the rendering, the UI component can update itself and/or change how the view looks.
- If a UI component can’t do something within the lifetime of the current animation frame, the flow will be lost. Therefore, UI components should check if they need to animate within the next frame.
How to create a custom animation in Flutter?
You can create your own animation through Flutter’s native Animation Creator. The Animation Creator provides a set of predefined animations that you can freely use to create your own animations.
You can create Flutter animations using a no-code tool, all you have to do is choose Flutter as the framework and set player type along with other animation options, export and embed your animation.
You can also make your animation interactive by choosing to play on tap instead of loading instantly. Create Flutter animated icons, logos, login screen illustrations and more, more easily than ever!
Final Words
There’s no denying the fact that user interfaces with animations are compelling and responsive. And, it’s not difficult to build animations with Flutter. However, it’s crucial that you do your homework and are really clear about what your app actually needs. Thus, you will get the best-in-class user experience without sacrificing much on the performance.
So, go ahead and create your dream app with Flutter!
