Android Animations Are Just a Trick
So I was learning to animate Views in Android using this video and was having trouble with the second time the animation runned. First run the objects end up in their destination, second run it was mayhem. I had fallen victim to the great misunderstanding everyone makes about Android animations: they are just a magic trick.
The animated View isn’t actually moving (or rotating, or scaling, or fading). The animation is actually just an order to the rendering engine to perform a last minute transformation on the desired object. The real object never leaves it’s initial position.
So the first time my animation runned I was making the view move from A to B. Now the second time I was trying to move it from B to C, but even when I was seeing the View in B (because I’ve setted the android:fillAfter="true" flag) the real object was in A the whole time. Therefore the second run of the animation ended up in disaster.
To fix this there are 2 solutions:
- Update the View object once the animation has finished using an AnimationListener and do it
onAnimationEnd(). - Use an ObjectAnimator which updates the underlying property while performing the animation. Or use NineOldAndroids if your target sdk is <11.