Case Study — 2026

A Field Guide to App Animations

A list of a hundred little animations you see in apps every day — the pull-to-refresh bounce, the heart that bursts when you like something — each with the true story of where it came from and how it really works.

  • Research
  • Animation
  • Reference

Half of what everyone 'knows' about famous app moments turns out to be slightly wrong.

This is a list of a hundred small animations you see in apps every single day and mostly never think about — the little bounce when you pull a feed to refresh, the heart that bursts when you like a photo, the way a menu slides open, the way a loading placeholder shimmers. I wrote down all hundred, each with two things attached: where it actually came from, and how it really works underneath.

It exists because I kept needing exactly that and couldn’t trust my memory for it. When you’re rebuilding one of these, “make it feel modern” is useless — you need the exact speed, the exact bounce, the actual history. So the one rule was that nothing goes on the list from memory. I looked each one up and wrote down what’s true, including the couple of entries where the true answer is that nobody actually knows who made them.

Looking a hundred of these up corrects a surprising amount of what you’re sure you remember — including famous ones almost everyone dates to the wrong year. Those corrections turned into their own post: I checked a hundred things everyone thinks they remember. The guide is also the source that Ten Apps, Rebuilt by Hand and Retro Computing draw from.