Animate change of view background color on Android

Question

How do you animate the change of background color of a view on Android?

For example:

I have a view with a red background color. The background color of the

Answer 1

I've found that the implementation used by ArgbEvaluator in the Android source code does best job in transitioning colors. When using HSV, depending on the two colors, the transition was jumping through too many hues for me. But this method's doesn't.

If you are trying to simply animate, use ArgbEvaluator with ValueAnimator as suggested here:

ValueAnimator colorAnimation = ValueAnimator.ofObject(new ArgbEvaluator(), colorFrom, colorTo);
colorAnimation.addUpdateListener(new AnimatorUpdateListener() {

    @Override
    public void onAnimationUpdate(ValueAnimator animator) {
        view.setBackgroundColor((int) animator.getAnimatedValue());
    }

});
colorAnimation.start();

However, if you are like me and want to tie your transition with some user gesture or other value passed from an input, the ValueAnimator is not of much help (unless your are targeting for API 22 and above, in which case you can use the ValueAnimator.setCurrentFraction() method). When targeting below API 22, wrap the code found in ArgbEvaluator source code in your own method, as shown below:

public static int interpolateColor(float fraction, int startValue, int endValue) {
    int startA = (startValue >> 24) & 0xff;
    int startR = (startValue >> 16) & 0xff;
    int startG = (startValue >> 8) & 0xff;
    int startB = startValue & 0xff;
    int endA = (endValue >> 24) & 0xff;
    int endR = (endValue >> 16) & 0xff;
    int endG = (endValue >> 8) & 0xff;
    int endB = endValue & 0xff;
    return ((startA + (int) (fraction * (endA - startA))) << 24) |
            ((startR + (int) (fraction * (endR - startR))) << 16) |
            ((startG + (int) (fraction * (endG - startG))) << 8) |
            ((startB + (int) (fraction * (endB - startB))));
}

And use it however you wish.