android_avd_splash

Turns a Lottie animation, an animated SVG or an animated GIF into an Android 12+ splash screen: an AnimatedVectorDrawable, every resource the platform needs around it, and the two edits that connect them to your launcher activity. One configuration file, one command.

Recorded from release builds at the device's own 1440x2960 and 60 fps. Each one starts on the home screen, shows the tap and the launch transition, plays the drawable for the source's full length, and ends after the app takes over. Select a preview to open the full-resolution video. The time in brackets is the animation's own, not the recording's:

Lottie — 3.97s

Animated SVG — 4.57s

Animated GIF — 2.03s

dart pub add dev:android_avd_splash
dart run android_avd_splash:create

# android_avd_splash.yaml
android_avd_splash:
  source: assets/splash.json
  background: "#FF102030"
  duration_ms: 1000

assets/splash.json -> @drawable/splash (Lottie, 1000 ms)
  2 paths, 63.8 KiB, 26 morphing Bezier segments per frame
  accuracy 100.0% of a 1.0000 ceiling, outline within 0.00dp
  icon reaches 95.9dp of the 96dp the platform shows
  33 files written

Launcher activity theme: @style/Theme.Splash (set in AndroidManifest.xml)
Handover: AvdSplash.install(this) in MainActivity.kt, beside AvdSplash.kt

No runtime dependency is added to your app: the output is platform XML plus one generated Kotlin (or Java) file. Nothing is left at runtime to go wrong on a device you have not tested.

Why a drawable and not a GIF or a Lottie view

The platform splash screen draws windowSplashScreenAnimatedIcon, and it only accepts an AnimatedVectorDrawable. Anything else - a Lottie view, an image, a splash Activity - can only run after the window is already up, which is the flash the splash screen API exists to remove.

Accuracy

Lottie is vector in, vector out, so the conversion is structural and exact: paths stay the author's Beziers, groups stay <group> transforms with the author's anchor as the pivot, keyframe easing becomes <pathInterpolator>, and opacity becomes fillAlpha. What has no Android equivalent is converted rather than declared:

• A plate the artwork sits on becomes the splash background. The platform masks the icon to a circle, so a square behind the artwork can only ever be drawn with its corners cut - and it would spend the whole icon on colour, at the artwork's expense.
• A primitive that animates - a rectangle's size, an ellipse's centre, a corner radius - animates. So does the trim on a stroke, cut along the path by arc length, and a motion path, walked four times per source frame and thinned back to a quarter of a dp.
• An alpha track matte becomes a <clip-path> with the matte wound out of a box around the layer. A matte is composed the way it is drawn - a whole precomposition, with layers appearing and vanishing and carrying mattes of their own, and a stroke's own half-width counted as coverage - and the result is wound, because a clip has no fill rule to declare one with.
• A mask that keeps a layer out of a shape becomes the same thing: a box with the shape wound out of it.
• Added masks form one clip union and subtracted masks form a second union punched out of it. Nesting those clips reproduces their intersection with the layer without flattening or tracing the vector geometry.
• SMIL is read the same way. <animateTransform> becomes the <group> it drives, keySplines becomes a <pathInterpolator>, keyTimes becomes the keyframe fractions, an <animate> on d becomes a path morph, and a <clipPath> becomes a wound <clip-path>. A run that repeats for ever is laid out once, because a splash screen plays once.
• A curved motion path is walked. to and ti bend the path a position travels along, and Lottie reads it by arc length, so the curve is sampled per source frame and thinned back to what a person could see - Android only moves in a straight line between keys.
• A trim on a filled shape is cut into the geometry with de Casteljau, because Android trims only strokes.
• Group opacity is folded into the paints below it, because a <group> cannot carry any.

A GIF has to be traced, and strict pixel agreement with one has a ceiling below 1.0 - a GIF edge owns whole pixels, a vector edge cuts through them. So the run measures that ceiling (the GIF's own contours rasterised straight back) and reports the share of it reached. Chase the percentage, not the raw number.

Source	Accuracy	Paths	Size	Morph load
Lottie, nested precomps and track mattes	100.0% of 1.0000	40	541 KiB	0
Lottie, stroked arcs and trims	100.0% of 1.0000	13	83 KiB	8
Lottie, gradients and trim	100.0% of 1.0000	8	162 KiB	34
Lottie, track mattes	100.0% of 1.0000	2	72 KiB	26
SVG, SMIL transforms	100.0% of 1.0000	10	80 KiB	0
GIF, flat colour	99.5% of 0.9987	7	778 KiB	264
GIF, photographic	97.7% of 0.9902	22	5.2 MiB	400

The numbers above are this package checking itself, which is worth exactly as much as the checker knowing what the platform does. So each release is also measured two ways it cannot fool: against the renderer the format came from - lottie-web for Lottie, a browser for SMIL, the decoded frames for a GIF - and against a real device, which plays the drawable beside a strip encoding its own elapsed milliseconds so a recorded frame can be lined up with the millisecond the model says it is. A keyframe that arrives at the wrong time is then a number rather than an impression.

Every run replays the XML it wrote - parsing it back, evaluating the animators and the interpolators, rasterising the result - and reports the overlap, the outline deviation in dp, and how far the artwork reaches. The measurement is taken from the written files, not from the model that produced them.

What the platform does to an animation you did not ask for

AnimatorInflater and KeyframeSet are quiet about all of this. A drawable that breaks any of these rules still inflates, still runs, and still verifies against anything that reads the file the way it was written rather than the way Android reads it.

• An <objectAnimator> with no android:interpolator is accelerate-decelerate, and that curve is applied to the whole track before a keyframe is consulted. Every animator written here names the linear interpolator, so the only easing in the file is the author's own.
• Two keyframes at one fraction are not a step. KeyframeSet divides by the gap between the keyframes around a fraction. A step - a layer appearing, a GIF frame changing - is written as a change one millisecond wide instead, which is under a rendered frame at any length a splash screen has.
• pathData keyframes inside a <propertyValuesHolder> are ignored, and android:valueFrom cannot be left off a pathData animator. A morph is a <set android:ordering="sequentially"> of one two-value <objectAnimator> per step.
• A track that stops short keeps drifting: the native animator extrapolates past its outermost keyframes instead of holding them. Every track carries a keyframe at 0 and at 1 - and where the timeline cuts an interval short, the cubic easing of that interval is split at the cut rather than reused whole.
• A <clip-path> has no fill type. VectorDrawableClipPath reads name and pathData and nothing else, so a clip always fills by winding and a hole in one has to be wound against the loop around it.
• SplashScreenView.getIconAnimationDuration() is capped by the platform, so the handover holds the screen for the drawable's own length instead.
• A compiled resource string is fifteen bits long. A longer <path> comes back broken at runtime and the splash screen answers by silently showing the launcher icon.
• A trim whose start has run past its end is a window across the seam, and the platform draws the rest of the outline. Lottie draws the arc between the lower and the higher of the two, so the pair is written in order, with the offset folded in where the two cross.
• z closes a contour whatever its geometry says, so an open one is drawn with a chord across it and a miter join at the seam. Only a contour that returns to its start is closed here.

Guidelines it enforces

• The icon is drawn on a 288dp canvas and the artwork is kept inside the 192dp circle the platform shows; the outer third is masked. Geometry that would be clipped is scaled to fit, and measured after fitting rather than before.
• The theme is written whole in values/, values-v31/ and values-v33/, because Android resolves a style from one configuration and styles never merge. Night is a colour resource, so it needs no version qualifier of its own - and a missing values-night-v31 is exactly how an API 31 device in dark mode loses its animated icon.
• No <path> is written longer than an Android resource string can hold. aapt2 stores a compiled XML's strings with a fifteen-bit length, so a longer one comes back broken, the drawable fails to inflate, and the splash screen answers by silently showing the launcher icon. Paths that would overrun it are split across <path> elements, keeping each outline with the outlines nested inside it, so the drawing is unchanged.
• An animation longer than 1000ms is reported, because the guidelines ask for one second or less on phones. duration_ms: replays it faster; every keyframe moves by one factor, so the motion is unchanged.
• On API 31 and 32 the platform shows the animated icon only when the app is launched from the launcher; every other entry point gets the background alone. icon_preferred asks for the icon everywhere, and Android 13 is where that attribute starts working - which is why it is written into values-v33/.
• No splash Activity is generated. Android 12 and up hand the screen over through setOnExitAnimationListener, held for the drawable's own length because the platform caps the duration it reports. Below API 31, where there is no platform splash screen, the generated helper plays the same drawable over the launch theme's background, so one animation covers every version.

Configuration

android_avd_splash.yaml in the project root. Only source: is required.

Option	Default	What it does
source	-	.json Lottie, .svg or .gif, relative to the project root
name	splash	resource stem: @drawable/splash, @style/Theme.Splash
background	GIF's own, else white	one opaque colour, #RRGGBB or #AARRGGBB
background_night	-	the same under values-night
icon_background	-	optional circle behind the icon
duration_ms	the animation's own	replays it over this long
canvas_dp	288	drawable canvas; the outer third is masked
safe_radius_dp	96	how far the artwork may reach from the centre
max_morph	400	morphing Bezier segments allowed per frame; 0 lifts it
icon_preferred	true	ask Android 13+ to show the icon regardless of entry point
android_dir	android	the Android module inside the project
patch_manifest	true	set android:theme on the launcher activity
patch_activity	true	write the handover call into the activity
verify	true	replay the written XML and report
gradients	true	fill a region with a gradient when it needs one
trim	true	drop time at either end where nothing is drawn, and a GIF's static tail
smooth	measured	GIF only: blur in source pixels before tracing
colors	the GIF's own	GIF only: paint colours, front to back

create also takes --project <dir>, --config <path> and --dry-run.

What it writes

Into android/app/src/main/:

res/drawable/splash.xml              the <animated-vector>
res/drawable/splash_vector.xml       its <vector>: groups, clip paths, paths
res/animator/splash_*.xml            one animator per animated property
res/interpolator/splash_ease*.xml    one <pathInterpolator> per distinct easing
res/values/splash.xml                background colour, icon size, duration
res/values-night/splash.xml          the night background
res/values/splash_styles.xml         launch theme below API 31
res/values-v31/splash_styles.xml     the platform splash screen theme
res/values-v33/splash_styles.xml     the same, asking for the icon explicitly
kotlin/.../AvdSplash.kt              the handover, generated and commented

and edits two files: android:theme on the launcher activity in AndroidManifest.xml, and one marked block in MainActivity. Both edits are textual and idempotent - the manifest is not reserialised, and the activity block is delimited by comment markers, so a second run replaces exactly what the first one wrote and nothing you added. Resources from an earlier run that this one no longer needs are deleted rather than left to ship in the APK.

Converting without a project

dart run android_avd_splash:avdgen logo.json --out path/to/res
dart run android_avd_splash:avdgen logo.svg --out path/to/res
dart run android_avd_splash:avdgen logo.gif --dry-run

avdgen writes the drawable, its animators and its interpolators, and nothing else: no theme, no colours, no edits.

As a library

import 'package:android_avd_splash/android_avd_splash.dart';

final result = createSplash(SplashConfig.read('.'));
print(result.report?.ofCeiling);

final drawable = convertSvg(File('logo.svg').readAsBytesSync());
print(drawable.files['drawable/splash.xml']);

Limits

• An SVG is read for its own animation: SMIL. CSS @keyframes, <style> rules and class selectors, <mask>, <filter>, <pattern>, <text> and <image> are reported, not silently dropped - and so is a skew, because a <group> has no shear and no pair of scales and rotations makes one.
• A colour that animates is reported. AnimatedVectorDrawable can animate one, but a path here carries a single paint, so a file that recolours itself would otherwise show the first colour as if it never changed.
• Lottie repeaters, merge paths, star shapes, luma mattes, text, image and solid layers are reported, not silently dropped.
• A mask on a layer that is itself being used as a matte is reported. Its coverage requires intersecting two independently animated regions while flattening the whole result into the single clip path Android accepts.
• AnimatedVectorDrawable cannot animate a gradient, so a gradient is fitted once, from the frame that shows its region most fully.
• A <clip-path> is not anti-aliased and has no fill type, so a matte edge is harder than Lottie draws it, and a self-intersecting matte outline - one the even-odd rule would hollow out - cannot be expressed. Nested outlines, which is what mattes are in practice, can.
• A GIF that crops its own artwork produces cropped outlines, faithfully. On a small source one GIF pixel covers several dp once blown up to icon size, so trace from the largest source you have - or convert the vector artwork instead.
• iOS is out of scope. This generates Android platform resources.