Most efficient way to show frame by frame animation android

Question

I am trying to show frame by frame animation by changing images in a imageview. I tried animation drawable in xml and also changing the bitmap of the imageview inside a Handler.

Answer 1

Loading the bitmaps from assets instead of resources saved 40% decoding time for me. You might want to try that.

So this went from 5 seconds with resources to 3 seconds on your pictures on my 2012 Nexus 7:

long time = System.currentTimeMillis();
try {
    for (int i = 0; i < 35; i++) {
        InputStream assetStream = getAssets().open(
                "_step" + (i + 1) + ".png");
        try {
            Bitmap bitmap = BitmapFactory.decodeStream(assetStream);
            if (bitmap == null) {
                throw new RuntimeException("Could not load bitmap");
            }
            mBitmaps.add(bitmap);
        } finally {
            assetStream.close();
        }
    }
} catch (Exception e) {
    throw new RuntimeException(e);
}
Log.d("ANIM", "Loading bitmaps elapsed "+(System.currentTimeMillis() - time)+"ms");