All 7 Implicit vs Explicit Animations questions
More in Implicit vs Explicit Animations
What are implicit animations in Flutter, and how do widgets such as AnimatedContainer and AnimatedOpacity let you achieve a genuinely smooth animation with genuinely minimal required code? How does the specific curve parameter available on both implicit and explicit animations genuinely let you meaningfully control the actual pacing and overall feel of a given animation, beyond simply relying entirely on a plain, constant linear speed? How can you properly convert a piece of code originally written using an implicit animation over to using an explicit animation instead, once your particular given animation's own requirements have genuinely grown considerably more complex over time? How do you properly and correctly manage several separate implicit animations together within exactly the same single widget, ensuring each individual one properly and correctly animates completely independently as its own genuinely underlying separate value actually changes? How does the TweenAnimationBuilder widget genuinely let you achieve a considerably more custom implicit animation effect, without actually needing to fully write out an entirely separate fully custom implicit animation widget class completely from scratch yourself? What are the genuine practical performance tradeoffs of using several separate simpler implicit animations compared to using one single, considerably more complex coordinated explicit animation for a genuinely elaborate combined multi part visual effect?
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Flutter › Implicit vs Explicit Animations

What are explicit animations in Flutter, and why might you genuinely need to use one instead of simply relying entirely on a considerably simpler implicit animation widget?

Beginner

Answer

Explicit animations require you to manually manage an underlying AnimationController yourself, giving you genuinely full and complete control over precisely when a given animation actually starts, stops, reverses, or repeats, and you would genuinely reach for an explicit animation instead of a considerably simpler implicit one whenever you genuinely need this kind of precise manual control, such as building a genuinely custom animation that needs to properly pause partway through in direct response to a specific user interaction, or when coordinating several genuinely separate related animations together that all genuinely need to remain perfectly synchronized with one another.
final controller = AnimationController(duration: Duration(seconds: 1), vsync: this);
controller.repeat(reverse: true);
Real-world example A custom pulsing loading indicator uses an explicit AnimationController set to genuinely repeat with reverse enabled, continuously and smoothly animating back and forth between two different specific states, an effect that would genuinely be considerably more difficult to properly achieve using a considerably simpler implicit animation widget alone.

Common follow-ups: How much genuinely additional code does an explicit animation typically actually require compared to an equivalent implicit one?;Can you actually properly pause an implicit animation partway through once it has already genuinely begun?

Flutter Animations Basics;Custom Painters & CustomPaint
All 7 Implicit vs Explicit Animations questions