quiet-motion

Reduce-motion-safe animation primitives for Compose Multiplatform. Android and iOS.

Two problems, both small, both easy to get wrong:

1. Staggered list entrances replay on every scroll. A LazyColumn disposes a row that scrolls out of view and composes it again on the way back, taking any remember { false } entrance flag with it. The animation runs again, and the list never stops twitching.
2. "Reduce motion" is medical, and it is easy to half-honour. Vestibular disorders and migraine are why the setting exists. An app that checks a boolean at each call site will eventually forget one — and the animation it forgets is the one that makes somebody ill.

This library is the answer to both, in about 300 lines.

Android	iOS

Same code both times — sample/shared is one App() composable. The list arrives staggered, scrolls away and back without replaying, replays when asked to, and then holds perfectly still once reduce motion is on: the entrance snaps in, breathing() stops at its end value, and the shimmer becomes a plain bar because sweeping() returns null. Nothing in the sample checks a reduce-motion flag; it provides the scale once.

Run it yourself: sample/README.md.

Platforms

Target	Reduce-motion detected from
Android	Animator duration scale — what Accessibility → Remove animations writes to
iOS (iosArm64, iosSimulatorArm64)	UIAccessibilityIsReduceMotionEnabled
JVM / desktop	Nothing — see below

Desktop has no portable reduce-motion setting, so prefersReducedMotion() answers false there. That does not leave you stuck: every primitive here multiplies by LocalMotionScale, so provide the scale yourself and the whole library obeys it. rememberMotionScale() is a convenience for the two platforms that can answer for themselves, not the only way in.

No iosX64: Compose Multiplatform 1.11.x publishes no artifacts for the Intel-Mac simulator, so the dependency could not resolve there anyway.

Install

Published to Maven Central as com.sinebloc:quiet-motion.

// build.gradle.kts
kotlin {
    sourceSets {
        commonMain.dependencies {
            implementation("com.sinebloc:quiet-motion:0.1.0")
        }
    }
}

Version catalog, if you keep one:

# gradle/libs.versions.toml
[libraries]
quiet-motion = { module = "com.sinebloc:quiet-motion", version = "0.1.0" }

Compose pulls transitive androidx artifacts, so your repositories need google() alongside mavenCentral() — as any Compose Multiplatform consumer does:

// settings.gradle.kts
dependencyResolutionManagement {
    repositories {
        google()
        mavenCentral()
    }
}

Building against an unreleased change is ./gradlew publishToMavenLocal here, plus mavenLocal() in the consuming build. Cutting a release is RELEASING.md.

Provide the scale once

Everything here multiplies by one composition local. Provide it near the root of your tree and you are done — there is no second thing to remember:

@Composable
fun AppTheme(content: @Composable () -> Unit) {
    CompositionLocalProvider(LocalMotionScale provides rememberMotionScale()) {
        content()
    }
}

rememberMotionScale() returns 0f when the platform asks for reduced motion and 1f otherwise. On iOS that is UIAccessibilityIsReduceMotionEnabled; on Android it is the animator duration scale, which is what Accessibility → Remove animations writes to and the one users actually reach for.

A scale rather than a boolean, deliberately: tweenScaled multiplies, so a future half-speed preference is a different number here and no second code path anywhere else.

Arrivals

Hold the record of what has already been seen above the list that draws it:

val arrivals = rememberArrivals()

LazyColumn {
    itemsIndexed(rows) { index, row ->
        Card(Modifier.arriving(arrivals, row.id, delayMillis = QuietMotion.stagger(index)))
    }
}

A row's first appearance fades and lifts into place. Its second appearance — after scrolling away and back — draws in place with no animation and holds no animation state at all. rememberArrivals(selectedTab) makes a tab change count as arriving again, while scrolling still does not.

arrivalProgress(...) gives you the same 0→1 value when it has to drive layout rather than opacity. It costs a recomposition per frame, because the value is read during composition; reach for Modifier.arriving unless something has to change size.

The rest

tweenMotion(...)	The standard tween, already scaled.
tweenScaled(scale, ...)	Same, for callers that cannot read a composition local — a NavHost's transition slots and an AnimatedContent's transitionSpec are not composable lambdas. Read LocalMotionScale in your own body and hand the value down.
springMotion(...)	Critically damped by default. A plain snap() under reduce-motion.
scaledMillis(ms)	A duration, scaled, for when you need the number itself.
breathing(from, to, ...)	A value oscillating for something that waits. Returns to and starts no animation under reduce-motion.
sweeping(...)	A 0→1 loop for a shimmer. null under reduce-motion — a sweep frozen halfway is a smudge, not a calmer sweep, so the caller draws nothing.

breathing and sweeping exist because of a bug worth naming. The obvious way to make an infinite transition respect the scale is to multiply its duration and clamp it to at least a millisecond. When the scale is zero that yields a one-millisecond loop — a strobe at frame rate, delivered to precisely the people who asked for less movement. Five screens in the app this came from had written it that way. Do not hand-roll an infinite loop; call these.

What is tested, and what is not

./gradlew testAndroidHostTest runs the suite on the JVM.

Covered: tweenScaled's contract (a 0f scale collapses duration and delay to zero, and the scale is a multiplier rather than a switch), stagger's cap, and Arrivals' first-seen bookkeeping — which is testable without a UI harness precisely because it lives outside composition.

Not covered: breathing, sweeping and springMotion. Their guards are early returns inside @Composable functions and need Compose UI test infrastructure this module does not carry. They are the three things to check by hand after changing anything here — the sample's reduce-motion switch is there so that check takes a few seconds rather than a trip to Settings.

License

Apache-2.0. Extracted from a Compose Multiplatform app, where these primitives earned their shape.