A trick used by some manufacturers of low end Android devices is to deliberately disable animations. This makes the phone snappier and stops the UI feeling sluggish as the hardware struggles with animations which are used throughout the system.

Whilst this has no impact on functionality in general usage, there are many cases where the animation is the functionality. I had added a simple feature to an app recently which faded between two images - one a historical photo and another one taken recently. The client had a Huawei P30 lite which has animator duration scale disabled by default - and can only be changed by enabling developer mode. When they tried the image fader what they saw was the app quickly switching between two images - and was essentially a broken feature for this user.

Thank goodness for Stack Overflow. I’m hoping that this workaround, which uses a private API to set animation duration scale back to 1x for the app, doesn’t trigger the app being rejected. This is another demonstration of why indie developers are often iOS first - there are so many more variables to consider when doing Android development.