Most Indian smartphone users are on Android, and many on budget phones with less memory and slower GPUs than the devices designers own. An onboarding animation that looks perfect on a designer's iPhone can stutter on a typical user's phone, and stutter feels worse than no animation.
Set a device budget
Keep one inexpensive Android phone in the team and test every animation on it. Turn on "Profile GPU rendering" or use Android Studio's profiler to see dropped frames.
Cheap properties
Moving, scaling, rotating and fading are cheap because they can be handled by the GPU. Changing width, height, margins or layout forces the system to recalculate the layout every frame. Blur and large shadows are expensive on weak GPUs.
Vector animation files
Lottie, Rive and ExodeUI files are drawn live, so their cost depends on complexity. Fewer layers, fewer masks and mattes, simpler gradients and no embedded photos keep them fast. Pause animations that are off screen.
Data and size
Many users watch their data use. Prefer small vector files to videos and GIFs, lazy-load decorative animations, and do not block the first screen on an animation download. Also count the runtime library in your app size.
Respect the user
Users on battery saver or with reduced motion turned on should get calm, minimal motion. Keep important feedback, such as payment success, but drop decoration.
We make ExodeUI, which is built in India and has runtimes for React Native and Flutter. Whatever tool you use, measure on a real budget phone.