Lottie for iOS is a library that natively renders vector animations exported from After Effects and other design tools directly on iOS, macOS, tvOS, and visionOS.
The library solves the problem of recreating complex animations by hand in code. Instead, designers export animations in the bodymovin JSON format from After Effects, Sketch, or Haiku, and Lottie renders them natively with minimal developer effort. The animations are backed by JSON, making them extremely small in file size while supporting complex visual effects. The library provides playback controls including play, loop, speed adjustment, reversal, and interactive scrubbing, and supports rendering portions of animations. Runtime modification is possible, allowing developers to change colors, positions, and other keyframable values after the animation loads.
Lottie suits projects where designers and developers collaborate on motion design and where animation complexity would be prohibitive to hand-code. It works well for apps that need polished, frequently-updated animations without the overhead of maintaining frame-based assets. The tool is available through Swift Package Manager, CocoaPods, and Carthage, making integration straightforward for most iOS projects.
The project maintains active engagement with pull requests and issues, showing responsiveness to community contributions and bug reports. Development includes regular updates to support new Apple platforms as they emerge. The codebase receives ongoing refinement to improve performance and expand animation capabilities.
