👋 My name is Brandon Withrow and I build open source software.

I am the creator and primary maintainer of Lottie iOS.

The Story

Lottie is a library that renders complex vector animations on iOS, web, and Android. The project was born from my passion for animation and the cross-section of my skill sets in both software development and animation. Lottie is being used by dozens of top companies to produce delightful, eye-catching animations.

Lottie started as a personal project while I was working on the mobile team at Airbnb. After many great years with Airbnb, I am now self employed and continuing to maintain Lottie on my own. This is a passion project of mine, but it is harder and harder to justify working on Lottie with paying projects waiting in the wings.

Read more about Lottie

What's Happening Now

Lottie is still growing, and there are big plans for the future!
Last January, I rewrote Lottie from the ground up in Swift; a massive project that took two months to complete. The rewrite brought Lottie into the modern world while also opening the door to future features.
The move to Swift came with a few performance hits that need to be fixed. Aside from maintenance and continuing to increase the performance and render quality of Lottie, I am slowly adding interactive functionality to broaden Lottie's abilities even further.

In addition to ongoing work on Lottie, I also work to maintain the community that has sprung up around the framework. This includes:

• An animation regression testing repo (a huge private repo of animations that are regression tested with every version of Lottie to ensure quality)
• Fielding issues and fixing bugs
• Creating new releases
• Reviewing individual animation issues
• Writing tutorials on animation and coding
• Staying active in the public Lottie slack channel
• Getting feedback from industry users of Lottie

What's Next For Lottie?

There is a lot in the pipeline for Lottie, and I am always looking for feedback from Lottie users.

Build Roadmap

• Building a complete CI solution for managing all of the various build configurations. Currently all builds must be manually tested before cutting a new release of Lottie. Lottie supports macOS, iOS, and tvOS. Occasionally files are added to one project and not another.
• Improving the visual regression library and connecting it to CI
• Improve documentation
• More tutorials

Lottie Roadmap

• Rewrite value providers to increase swift performance
• Continue to add support for text layers
• Expression support
• Add support for video export
• Add single frame rendering support
• Making the entire model layer mutable (Create animations natively)
• Continue to add interactivity support to AnimationView
• 3d Support
• Support for merge paths
• Continued bug fixes

Thank you for considering your sponsorship of Lottie! If you have any questions, feel free to reach out.