Android Animation
Four libraries dominate Android animation, at very different maintenance levels. Lottie (Airbnb, Apache 2.0) is at v6.7.1 (Oct 31, 2025), renders Adobe After Effects/Bodymovin JSON natively, requires API 16+, and has 35,668 GitHub stars. MotionLayout ships inside androidx.constraintlayout, now at 2.2.1 (Feb 26, 2025) — but Google put the whole library in maintenance mode: critical fixes only, no new features, with constraintlayout-compose 1.1.1 as the recommended path forward. Rebound, Facebook's spring-physics engine, was archived in 2019 at v0.3.8 (5,391 stars); AndroidX's SpringAnimation replaced it. wasabeef's RecyclerView Animators sits at v4.0.2, raised minSdk to 21 in its 2020 Kotlin rewrite, has 11,543 stars, but its last commit was a README edit on Feb 14, 2021 — over five years dormant. Current version/status: Lottie 6.7.1 (Oct 2025); ConstraintLayout/MotionLayout 2.2.1 (Feb 2025, maintenance mode); RecyclerView Animators 4.0.2 (last commit Feb 2021); Rebound 0.3.8 (archived 2019). License: Apache 2.0 (Lottie, RecyclerView Animators, Rebound); Google/AOSP (ConstraintLayout, MotionLayout). Maintained by Split by library: Lottie = Airbnb (active); MotionLayout = Google/AndroidX team (maintenance mode); RecyclerView Animators = wasabeef, dormant since Feb 2021; Rebound = Meta, archived 2019.
Pick Lottie when a designer hands you an After Effects export and you need frame-accurate playback without hand-coding motion — it's the only one of these four still shipping regular releases (last one Oct 2025). Don't start new MotionLayout work: Google itself has it in maintenance mode, so build complex, state-driven motion in Compose instead. Never reach for Rebound in 2026 — archived since 2019, with no replacement needed since AndroidX SpringAnimation does the same job with actual support. RecyclerView Animators still functions for simple list-item transitions, but five-plus years without a commit means you own any Gradle/Kotlin compatibility fixes yourself. Known weakness: Lottie's own documentation acknowledges it doesn't support the full After Effects feature set — expressions and certain mask/matte types can render incorrectly or need manual rework before export.