ethanhua/skeleton

Skeleton is an Android library that shows placeholder animations while your app is loading data. The visual effect it produces is the same kind you see in apps like Facebook or Alipay: grey shaded shapes that roughly match the layout of the real content, sometimes with a sweeping shimmer animation passing over them, giving the user a sense of what is about to appear rather than a blank screen or a spinning wheel. The library works by letting you define a separate layout file that represents the skeleton version of your screen, usually a simplified version with grey rectangles where text and images will go. You bind your real view or list to the library with one or two lines of code, tell it which skeleton layout to use, and call show(). When your data arrives, you call hide() and the real content appears. The README emphasizes that it does not require changes to your existing layout code. It works with both regular Android views and RecyclerView, which is the standard component for displaying scrollable lists. Configuration options let you control whether the shimmer animation plays, how fast it moves, what color it uses, and how many placeholder list items to show. The README marks the project as deprecated, meaning the author no longer actively maintains it and recommends moving to other solutions. The shimmer animation itself is built on a dependency called ShimmerLayout from a separate open-source project. Adding the library requires two lines in your app's Gradle build file. No complex setup is needed beyond that.