Rive Blog

I happened to come across the following page recently: https://rive.app/blog/rive-as-a-lottie-alternative

I found it interesting that Rive officially compared itself to Lottie based on fairly recent information. However, I was quite surprised by the many vague or inaccurate statements made about Lottie. As a developer familiar with Lottie, I'd like to offer a different perspective on a few key points.

1. Responsiveness

The claim that Lottie "regenerate animations" to scale for different screen sizes is puzzling. In most GUI environments, responsiveness is handled by standard layout and scrolling systems. Since Lottie animations are vector-based, they naturally scale according to their aspect ratio within the assigned layout. There is no need to regenerate the animation—rendering scalable vector graphics in real time is already built into the design.

2. Dynamic Data Integration

It’s inaccurate to describe Lottie as strictly static. Event Lottie supports scripting and allows runtime updates of animation properties, enabling dynamic behavior driven by external data or user interaction.

3. Blurs and Shadows

Lottie fully supports vector-based effects such as Gaussian blur and drop shadows. These are rendered as scalable vector effects— How this specifically increases file size. Doesn't make sense.

4. Masking

Lottie has multiple types of masking, including at least four distinct modes. One of the most powerful is the Matte feature, which goes well beyond basic alpha…

I think something like what you're wishing for will happen, but I don't think it will come from Adobe.

I explored a bunch of apps in this category over the weekend and was pretty impressed with what's out there, although it still feels early. Rive (https://rive.app/) is probably the one I'm most excited about; their state-machine approach is novel (at least to me) and feels like a solid approach. Unfortunately they don't support text yet, which is a deal-breaker for what I wanted to do, but they say it's coming.

The Lottie (https://airbnb.design/lottie/) ecosystem is also interesting. Funny enough, Adobe still seems to dominate as a pipeline for generating Lottie files (Illustrator -> After Effects), even though you need a third-party plugin to do it.

Couple things I've seen in this space looking around the past couple weeks...

Flutter made a different engine called Impeller[0] which is replacing Skia. Which is a bit surprising as an ignorant outsider. I hope that works out.

Rive (https://rive.app), is a new animation tool that targets multiple platforms including web and their CEO Guido Rosso gave a great interview on School of Motion[1] about how they are building an animation first vector engine. There is a side by side demo at 46:56[2] of Skia, Impeller and Rive.

0: https://docs.flutter.dev/perf/impeller

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0Jd5-eStu4&t=2514s

2: https://youtu.be/U0Jd5-eStu4?si=8vv3c2bw3VumLzeu&t=2816

I have to agree with you. Maybe especially as someone coming from using flutter exclusively for app development. Someone joked about this at work "wait, so flutter 1 did not enable developers to create beautiful, fast and portable apps for any platform?"

I had a vague idea that flutter 1 had a desktop/server like backing so that it could be used to develop desktop apps. Maybe this was incorrect, and only possible now with flutter 2? I'm still confused. This app: https://rive.app/ was made using flutter 1, no? It runs in the browser, so maybe this is the key difference with flutter 2, that... it allows native apps?

I get that Flash hit a sweet spot. I'm not sure I get why nothing has really replaced it. There are other apps that give you animated vector graphics, in an IDE, with coding.

Here's 2?

https://rive.app/editor

https://cavalry.scenegroup.co/

I believe Unity doesn't do flash style vector animations. It will take in SVGs, turn them into meshes and apply skeletons. That said, it has replaced Flash in turns of the 1000s and 1000s of web games made with it.

https://poki.com/en/unity

https://itch.io/games/platform-web (majorty are Unity?)