shimmer-skeleton-loaders

Shimmer placeholders

The shimmer is one modifier. It measures itself, so a caller never passes a size — a placeholder is just a Box with a width, a height, a shape and this on the end:

// adapted
fun Modifier.shimmer(): Modifier = composed {
    val colors = LocalAppColors.current
    var size by remember { mutableStateOf(IntSize.Zero) }
    val transition = rememberInfiniteTransition(label = "Shimmer")
    val startOffsetX by transition.animateFloat(
        initialValue = -2 * size.width.toFloat(),
        targetValue  =  2 * size.width.toFloat(),
        animationSpec = infiniteRepeatable(animation = tween(1000)),
        label = "Shimmer",
    )
    background(
        brush = Brush.linearGradient(
            colors = listOf(colors.shimmerBackground, colors.shimmerLine, colors.shimmerBackground),
            start = Offset(startOffsetX, 0f),
            end   = Offset(startOffsetX + size.width.toFloat(), size.height.toFloat()),
        ),
    ).onGloballyPositioned { size = it.size }
}

Skeletons built on it are ordinary layout — no framework, no library. Each is a hand-laid stack of boxes at the sizes the real row will occupy, wrapped in the same list shape the real content uses.

Traps

Put clip before background, not after. clip is a graphics layer that clips what is drawn after it; a background to its left has already been painted, square. So .background(base).clip(shape).shimmer() gives you a square base colour under a rounded sweep — and looks fine on the day you write it, because the sweep is the visible half. The other order, .clip(shape).background(base).shimmer(), rounds both. It is easy to end up with both orders in one file; the verify grep below is exactly for that.

Keep a solid base colour under the sweep — the first frame has no size. size starts at IntSize.Zero, so on the composition before the first layout pass start and end are the same point and the gradient is degenerate: what it resolves to is an engine detail, not something to reason about or rely on. The solid .background(colors.shimmerBackground) every call site paints first is what guarantees a painted first frame, whatever the degenerate gradient does over it.

Each call site animates independently. composed { } materialises per use, so every placeholder box holds its own rememberInfiniteTransition and measures its own width. Twenty boxes are twenty unsynchronised animations — the sweeps will not line up across a row, and a wide box and a narrow one beside it travel at different speeds because the travel range is a multiple of each box's own width. If a screen needs one coherent wave across several boxes, hoist a single transition and pass the phase down instead.

The sweep is off the box for roughly half of each cycle. Travel runs from -2 × width to +2 × width while the band itself is one width across, so the band overlaps the box for about half the cycle; a linear gradient clamps outside its stops, and both outer stops are the base colour, so the rest of the cycle is a flat pause. That pause is the design here, not a bug — but if you want a continuous ripple, narrow the travel range rather than speeding up the tween, which only makes the same pause arrive sooner.

The sweep is diagonal, and its angle follows the box's aspect ratio. The gradient ends at (startOffsetX + width, height), so it runs corner-to-corner: near-horizontal across a short wide title bar, steep down a tall square thumbnail. Inside one skeleton those angles differ visibly. If the design calls for one angle everywhere, fix the end offset's y to a constant instead of the measured height.

Switch scrolling off on every lazy list inside a skeleton. A skeleton holds an arbitrary, invented number of fake rows standing in for a count nobody knows yet; there is nothing further down to reach, and any scroll offset the user establishes is discarded the moment the real list — a different list, with different keys — replaces it. Nested lazy lists also compete for the drag with whatever scrolls outside them. LazyColumn(userScrollEnabled = false) on all of them.

Derive placeholder sizes from the real row, not by eye. The point of a skeleton is that nothing moves when the data lands. Read the real row's thumbnail size, text line heights and paddings and reuse those numbers; a placeholder that is 4 dp short produces a visible settle on every load, which reads as jank rather than as a wrong constant.

Shimmer colours do not belong in the material colour scheme. The base and the highlight line are two tokens with no scheme slot to sit in. Carry them in your own immutable colour holder exposed through a composition local, with a light and a dark instance, so the placeholder tracks the theme without a if (isDark) at every call site.

Verifying it

Run these from the repository root against your skeleton file and the file holding the modifier.

1. Find mismatched clip/background order. List both and compare line numbers per box: grep -n 'clip(\|background(' <skeletonFile> → observed: two placeholders had background( before clip( — at 33/35 and again at 136/138 — so their base colours are square, while every other pair in the file (56/58, 67/69, 78/80, …) puts clip( first. One file, both orders, and the second offender is far enough down that reading only the first few hits would have missed it: read the whole listing.
2. Every lazy list in the skeleton has scrolling disabled. Compare the two counts:

   grep -c 'LazyColumn(\|LazyRow(' <skeletonFile>
   grep -c 'userScrollEnabled = false' <skeletonFile>
   

   → observed: 3 and 3. Any gap is a skeleton the user can scroll.
3. The modifier measures itself rather than taking a size parameter. grep -n 'fun Modifier.shimmer\|composed {\|onGloballyPositioned\|size.width' <modifierFile> → observed: the composed { factory, the onGloballyPositioned write, and the reads of size.width in both the animation bounds and the gradient end point. A shared extensions file will surface unrelated hits from its other modifiers as well; match on the line numbers between fun Modifier.shimmer and the next declaration.
4. Screenshot the skeleton and the loaded screen at the same scroll position and flip between them. Anything that shifts is a placeholder measured by eye.