🆕 Kicking Off a New Series on Rive for iOS ✅

Welcome to issue #65 of the iOS Coffee Break Newsletter 📬.

Recently, our design team at work has been advocating for the use of polished, fluid animations built with Rive. I happened to be the one tasked with exploring it, so I dove in, learning the tool, experimenting with it, and creating a few prototype projects along the way.

That inspired me to start a new series in the newsletter called "Start building with Rive for iOS" that I want to share with you!

The content is directly inspired by the challenges I faced integrating Rive into a production iOS app: state handling, view model coordination, dynamic asset configuration, performance considerations, and more.

Each edition builds on the previous, moving from foundational concepts to more advanced, real-app use cases. By the end of the series, we'll have put together a fully animated iOS app powered by Rive.

Series Plan

This will be a 4-part deep dive into using Rive on iOS. Here's the high-level plan:

• Edition 1 - Foundations & App Narrative Setup
  • Introduction to Rive and its role in a modern SwiftUI/UIKit architecture
• Edition 2 - State-Driven Experiences (SwiftUI + UIKit)
  • Getting started with Rive's Apple runtime
  • Implementing a RiveViewModel
  • Coordinating Rive State Machines with SwiftUI and UIKit state
  • Building a custom animated tab bar driven by Rive animations
• Edition 3 - Dynamic Content, Localization, and Scalable Asset Strategy
  • Supporting multiple languages using Xcode String Catalogs and Rive bindings
  • Loading and applying fonts programmatically with the Rive iOS runtime, including fallback font support
• Edition 4: Advanced Workflows with Rive Scripting + AI Agent
  • Creating a Rive Script that coordinates the animation layers and state machines
  • Improving animation logic using the AI coding agent
  • Integrating the script-driven animation into the app and connecting it with live data

Rive Overview

Rive is an interactive motion platform where you can code, design, and animate in one collaborative editor. Instead of exporting frame-by-frame animations or videos, Rive uses vector graphics and state machines to create animations that can react instantly to user input and application state, while running them natively inside iOS apps.

In a modern iOS stack, Rive fits naturally alongside SwiftUI and UIKit as a dedicated layer for motion and interaction. Designers author animations and logic in the Rive editor, export a single .riv file, and developers integrate it using one of the available Rive runtimes.

The next edition will cover more about the Apple runtime for iOS. Until then, feel free to take a look at the documentation.

At runtime, animations are rendered efficiently using Metal, scale cleanly across device sizes, and can be driven directly from Swift code.

For SwiftUI apps, Rive works as an interactive view that can be bound to state, making animations a first-class part of a declarative UI.

In UIKit, Rive views integrate just like any other UIView, responding to gestures, control events, and view lifecycle changes.

This makes Rive a strong complement to native iOS animations, handling complex, interactive motion while keeping SwiftUI and UIKit focused on layout, state, and navigation.

🤝 Wrapping Up

Rive brings together an interactive design platform, a powerful state-based graphics format, a lightweight cross-platform runtime, and an extremely fast rendering engine.

In the next edition, we'll move on to part 2 of the series and explore how to build state-driven experiences with Rive on iOS. Stay tuned!

Have a great week ahead 🤎