Issues Getting Started with Lottie in React Native

Issues Getting Started with Lottie in React Native

The promise of Lottie is almost too good to be true: beautiful animations requiring 1/6th the normal processing oomph. What’s not to love?

I’d suggested using Lottie in a project at work, but we ended up resorting to plain old gifs instead because the iOS dev was ______. Anywho, not gonna speculate about what exactly the iOS dev was thinking.

I wanted to try Lottie out myself so I set to work following the standard instructions in Github.

The first time I encountered a difficult issue: I couldn’t get the animation to load at all. No error, no disruption to surrounding text or images. No nada. It just wasn’t showing up.

It was frustrating, but I was intrigued. But I also had a deadline, so I got distracted and put Lottie aside for a few weeks.

Finally ready to try again, I realized the issue when I’d remembered another similar error with displaying images from external sources… the height and width must be defined. For giggles I added inline styles of height and width at 150 and voilá!