react-native-ease vs Reanimated

react-native-ease and react-native-reanimated solve different problems. Choosing the right tool depends on what kind of animation you need.

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When to use react-native-ease

• Fade / slide / scale on state change ✅ — Toggle visibility, animate cards in and out, react to boolean state
• Enter / exit animations ✅ — Views fade or slide in on mount using initialAnimate
• Simple declarative animations tied to state ✅ — Set target values, get native motion

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When to use Reanimated

• Gesture-driven animations (pan, pinch) ✅ — Use react-native-gesture-handler with Reanimated shared values
• Layout animations (width, height) ✅ — Animating layout properties that require recalculation
• Complex interpolations and chaining ✅ — useAnimatedStyle, withSequence, withDelay chains
• Shared element transitions ✅ — Cross-screen element continuity via Reanimated or React Navigation
• Animation worklets and shared values across components ✅ — Cross-component coordinated animation

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Comparison table

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The key architectural difference

Both libraries aim to keep animations off the main JS thread, but they achieve this in fundamentally different ways. react-native-ease has zero JS involvement during animation. Once the native side receives the new target values, the animation runs entirely inside the platform — no JS callbacks, no prop updates, no re-renders. On iOS, Core Animation runs in a separate render server process (not even on the main thread). On Android, ObjectAnimator and SpringAnimation run on the UI thread, but they are considerably lighter-weight than Reanimated worklets. Reanimated runs animation worklets on a separate JS thread (its own JS runtime). This gives it the flexibility to respond to shared value changes, run complex interpolation logic, and coordinate animations across components — but it still involves a runtime per frame.

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Performance comparison

The example app includes a benchmark measuring per-frame animation overhead when animating translateX on a configurable number of views simultaneously (linear, 2s loop).

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Android

UI thread time per frame: anim + layout + draw (ms). Lower is better.

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10 views

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100 views

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500 views

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iOS

Display link callback time per frame (ms). Lower is better.

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10 views

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100 views

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500 views

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Why the numbers look this way

iOS near zero — Core Animation runs animations inside a separate render server process called backboardd. The process that runs your app code has no involvement at all once the animation is committed. The ~0.01ms measured is essentially measurement noise. Android lower than Reanimated — ObjectAnimator and SpringAnimation are lightweight OS-level animators. They update view properties directly on the UI thread with minimal overhead. Reanimated worklets involve a separate JS runtime that still communicates with the UI thread per frame.

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Non-goals of react-native-ease

These animation patterns are outside the scope of this library by design:

• Complex gesture-driven animations — pan, pinch, or velocity-based interactions require Reanimated and react-native-gesture-handler
• Layout animations — animating width, height, or any property that triggers a layout pass is not supported
• Shared element transitions — use Reanimated’s shared element API or React Navigation’s built-in transitions
• Old architecture — Fabric (new architecture) only; the old bridge architecture is not supported

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Can you use both in the same project?

Yes. react-native-ease and react-native-reanimated are completely independent and coexist without conflict. A common pattern is to use Ease for simple state-driven animations (tooltips, modals, cards) and Reanimated for gesture-driven interactions in the same app.