LayoutAnimation

LayoutAnimation is a core API that animates the next layout update across the whole app. You call it just before a state change, and every view that moves, resizes, appears or disappears in the resulting commit animates to its new position instead of jumping.

const toggle = () => {
  LayoutAnimation.configureNext(LayoutAnimation.Presets.easeInEaseOut);
  setExpanded((v) => !v);
};

There are three presets, easeInEaseOut, linear and spring, or you can pass your own config with a duration and separate create, update and delete settings. The animation runs natively, so it is smooth even while JavaScript is busy.

Its appeal is the effort-to-result ratio: an accordion, a list item being removed, or a card growing to show more detail, with no animated components, shared values or measured heights.

Its weakness is the same feature: it is global and one-shot.

• It animates everything that changes in that commit, including unrelated views that happen to re-render at the same moment, which can produce odd movement elsewhere on screen.
• It cannot be interrupted, reversed mid-way, or tied to a gesture.
• It applies to one commit only, so state changes that land in a later render jump without animating.

Older tutorials say Android needs UIManager.setLayoutAnimationEnabledExperimental(true). That flag mattered under the legacy architecture; with the New Architecture, the default since React Native 0.76, it does nothing and can be removed.

For anything that needs per-component control, use the entering, exiting and layout transitions from Reanimated, covered under layout animations. Keep LayoutAnimation for quick, self-contained transitions where “animate whatever changed” is exactly what you want.