Engineering · Animation · Tooling

Top 5 iOS animation libraries

Lottie, Rive, Pow, and two more, in the order you'd actually reach for them. Real install snippets, and one thing every dead-library trap has in common.

Muhammad Afham · July 2026 · 4 min read

01 · Lottie

github.com/airbnb/lottie-ios · Apache 2.0 · actively maintained, the industry standard

The one nearly every app with a polished onboarding flow is using. Lottie renders animations exported from After Effects (via the Bodymovin plugin) as vector JSON, so a designer ships a real animation file and you drop it in, no engineer re-implementing keyframes by hand. If your team has a designer who lives in After Effects, this is the bridge.

// Package.swift
.package(url: "https://github.com/airbnb/lottie-spm.git", from: "4.4.0")

import Lottie
let animationView = LottieAnimationView(name: "onboarding-success")
animationView.loopMode = .playOnce
animationView.play()

02 · Rive

github.com/rive-app/rive-ios · MIT · actively developed, real-time state machines

If Lottie is a video, Rive is a video game. Instead of a fixed timeline, animations are built as state machines that respond to input in real time, a button that squishes based on how hard you're pressing, a character that reacts to your app's actual data. It runs its own lightweight runtime rather than replaying frames, so it stays smooth even when the animation itself is complex.

// Package.swift
.package(url: "https://github.com/rive-app/rive-ios.git", from: "5.0.0")

import RiveRuntime
let view = RiveView()
let model = RiveViewModel(fileName: "loading_state")
model.setView(view)

03 · Pow

github.com/movingparts-io/Pow · MIT · SwiftUI-native, no external assets

Code-only, built specifically for SwiftUI. No JSON files, no design tool round-trip, just chainable view modifiers for the small "juice" moments: a view that shakes on error, a button that pops with an elastic bounce, a badge that appears with a spring. If your team is SwiftUI-only and doesn't have a motion designer, this covers most of what you'd otherwise hand-roll with withAnimation blocks.

// Package.swift
.package(url: "https://github.com/movingparts-io/Pow", from: "1.0.0")

import Pow
Text("Saved")
    .conditionalEffect(.pushDown, condition: isPressed)
    .transition(.movingParts.pop)

04 · Native SwiftUI: Animation, PhaseAnimator, KeyframeAnimator

Built into iOS 17+ · zero dependencies · the honest first stop

Worth naming explicitly rather than skipping past: Apple's own animation APIs have gotten genuinely good. PhaseAnimator sequences a view through discrete states without a state machine of your own, and KeyframeAnimator gives you per-property timelines, close to what a dedicated library used to be needed for.

PhaseAnimator([false, true]) { phase in
    Circle().scaleEffect(phase ? 1.2 : 1)
} animation: { _ in .spring(duration: 0.4, bounce: 0.5) }

05 · ConfettiSwiftUI

github.com/simibac/ConfettiSwiftUI · MIT · small, focused, does one thing

The niche pick, included because "one thing done well" is worth celebrating on this list too. It's exactly what the name says: a confetti burst, triggered on a state change, for the one or two celebration moments an app actually has (a completed purchase, a finished onboarding). Not a general animation engine, and it shouldn't try to be one.

// Package.swift
.package(url: "https://github.com/simibac/ConfettiSwiftUI.git", from: "2.0.0")

import ConfettiSwiftUI
Text("🎉").confettiCannon(trigger: $didComplete)

One to avoid

Facebook's Pop was the standard recommendation for physics-based animation for years, and it's still copy-pasted into "best iOS libraries" lists in 2026. It was archived in March 2020 and is now read-only: no fixes, no Swift 6 support, no future. It's the clearest example of why "popular" and "currently correct" aren't the same question, and why every entry on this list was checked against its actual commit history before being written down, not just its reputation.

Which one to use