Custom Navigational Transitions in iOS
Article Summary
Zalando's iOS team tackled a deceptively hard problem: creating smooth screen transitions when the entire UI is driven by the backend.
Most custom iOS transitions are straightforward when you control the UI. But what happens when your screens are backend-driven and navigation is handled by generic deep-link routing? Zalando's engineering team shares how they solved this for their fashion app.
Key Takeaways
- Backend-driven UI made identifying tapped views and their positions a major challenge
- Initial snapshot approach caused pixelation and awkward text scaling issues
- Recursive rendering with selective component inclusion created high-quality transitions
- Solution works generically across screens since it lives in the framework layer
Critical Insight
By combining UIKit's View Controller Transitions API with custom recursive rendering, Zalando created smooth, production-ready transitions for their backend-driven iOS app.
