android-gif-drawable is a library that provides Views and Drawable classes for displaying animated GIFs on Android.
The library solves the problem of efficiently rendering animated GIFs on Android devices. Rather than relying on WebView or the Movie class, it bundles GIFLib and exposes it through JNI to render frames directly, which the README indicates should be more efficient than those alternatives. The approach uses native code to handle GIF decoding and frame rendering.
Developers should choose this library if they need to display animated GIFs in their Android applications and want better performance than platform alternatives. It suits projects targeting Android 4.2 and above. The library provides multiple integration points: GifImageView and GifImageButton work as drop-in replacements for standard ImageView and ImageButton, accepting GIF files through XML attributes or Java setters. GifTextView allows GIFs as compound drawables and backgrounds. For more advanced use cases, GifDrawable can be constructed directly from various sources. GifTextureView offers hardware-accelerated rendering for devices that support it, and GifTexImage2D provides OpenGL ES 2.0 integration. If a drawable is not a GIF file, the Views degrade gracefully to behave like their standard Android counterparts.
The project maintains active CI/CD infrastructure with automated builds. Development occurs across multiple branches, with snapshot builds from the development branch published to a snapshot repository alongside stable releases to Maven Central. The library includes comprehensive Javadoc documentation and provides a sample project demonstrating usage, though the README notes that not all features are covered in the sample yet. Building from source requires the Android NDK to compile native components.
