Android MotionLayout: Creating the Twitter splash screen in the simplest way possible (Part I)

Remember the Twitter’s “oh so famous” splash screen that everyone talked about and had their version to imitate it? It’s now easier than ever to achieve that with the new MotionLayout from the Android Jetpack library. And that’s what we’ll create in this post and in addition, learn some basics about how MotionLayout works.

For those who wonder about the Twitter splash screen, here’s the animation that we’re going to achieve in this post:

Background ✍️

• MotionLayout is a subclass of Android ConstraintLayout which allows you to animate just about any view or layout in the app very easily.
• Good news is that it is backwards-compatible to API level 14 (Android 4.0), so the animations you create can pretty much work on all Android versions your users might use.
• Even though you can create the MotionLayout animations with Android Studio < 4.0, there are better tools in AS 4.0 that I’d strongly recommend to use when you work with MotionLayout.
• While it is still in beta, it’s not widely adopted…