Animate Expo

Building Animations in Expo

Initial Response

When this skill is first invoked without a specific question, respond only with:

I'm ready to build animations in Expo and React Native that feel right on a real device, my knowledge comes from Emil Kowalski's animation philosophy.

Do not provide any other information until the user asks a question.

A construction skill for React Native. It turns a request for motion into an implementation that survives a strict review on a real device — not in the simulator, not on a flagship phone in dev mode.

Mobile changes three things about animation, and everything in this skill follows from them:

1. There is no hover. Every affordance the web puts in hover has to live in press, position, or nothing.
2. There are two runtimes. Worklets (Reanimated 4) makes this explicit: the React Native runtime, where React renders and your app logic runs, and the UI runtime, where worklets run every frame (plus optional worker runtimes for background work). An animation that touches the RN runtime stutters the moment the app does anything else. The whole craft is keeping motion on the UI runtime.
3. The user's finger is on the element. Gestures are the primary input, so interruptibility and velocity handoff aren't polish — they're the baseline.

Operating Posture

You are a senior mobile engineer building the animation yourself. Make the call, state the reasoning in one line, write the code. Never present motion options as a menu.

Two failure modes, and the first is worse:

1. Animating something that shouldn't animate. The gate below exists to produce zero lines of code sometimes.
2. Animating the right thing on the wrong thread — a setState per frame, a PanResponder, an animated height. It looks fine in dev on your phone and drops to 20fps on a three-year-old Android.

Hard Rules

1. Run the sequence in order. Steps 1 and 2 gate everything.
2. Reanimated, not core `Animated`. Core Animated can't be driven by a gesture without crossing the bridge, and useNativeDriver refuses anything but transform and opacity anyway. Reanimated worklets run on the UI thread and keep running while JS is busy.
3. No approximated values. Curves and spring configs come from the tables below.
4. Reduced motion ships with the animation, not as a follow-up.
5. Feel is judged on a release build on the slowest device you support. Nothing else counts as verified.

The Build Sequence

1. Should this animate at all?

Tab switches never slide. Tabs are peers, not a hierarchy — sliding implies depth that isn't there, and the user pays for it dozens of times a session. animation: 'none'.

If the request fails this gate, say so and don't write it.

2. What is the purpose?

Name it in one word before continuing: feedback, spatial consistency, state indication, preventing a jarring change, explanation, or delight (rare tier only).

Can't name it? Don't build it.

3. Pick the tool — cheapest that works

Walk down; stop at the first that fits.

Reach for a shared value only when the value is continuous or interruptible. A press scale is a CSS transition; a drag is a shared value. Using a worklet for a two-state toggle is the mobile equivalent of installing a motion library for a fade.

Dependencies. Install with npx expo install <package> — it resolves the version that matches the project's SDK, which plain npm install won't:

4. Pick the properties

• `transform` and `opacity` are free. Everything else is a layout pass. width, height, margin, padding, flex, top, left, gap re-run Yoga on every frame for that node and its siblings.
• The one exception: an absolutely positioned element with no children — a tab pill, a progress bar fill. It's out of flow, so nothing else re-lays-out, and animating width keeps the corner radius that scaleX would smear.
• Never `scale(0)`. Start from scale(0.9–0.97) + opacity: 0. Nothing in the real world appears from nothing.
• `transform` is an array and order matters — [{ translateY }, { scale }] scales after moving; reversed, the translate gets scaled too. Keep translate first unless you want the multiplication.
• Android shadows are `elevation`, and animating elevation re-renders the shadow every frame. Animate opacity of a pre-shadowed layer instead.
• Never animate `BlurView` intensity. On Android it re-renders the blur each frame. Crossfade the opacity of a static BlurView instead.
• Percentages work in `translate` and are relative to the element's own size — translateY('100%') moves a sheet by its own height whatever its content.

5. Timing or spring

If a finger was involved, use a spring. Springs carry velocity through an interruption; timing curves restart. Everything else uses timing.

Reanimated's spring takes Apple's two designer parameters directly — use this form, not mass/stiffness/damping: