Advanced Lottie Animation Memory Management in iOS
Article Summary
Timotius Leonardo Lianoto from IDN Media discovered their livestream gift animations were silently eating memory with every play. Even following Lottie's official docs didn't prevent the leak.
While building a livestream gifting feature for the IDN App, the iOS team hit a critical memory management issue. Lottie animations weren't releasing memory after playback, despite proper cleanup code. The team profiled the app and found a surprising solution that contradicts typical iOS memory management patterns.
Key Takeaways
- LottieAnimationView instances never released memory even after removeFromSuperview() and nil assignment
- Wrapping animations in a container UIView fixed the leak completely
- Memory dropped immediately after playback when using the container pattern
- Lottie SDK caches downloaded animations, causing expected baseline memory increase
Adding a simple UIView container between your view controller and LottieAnimationView prevents memory leaks that standard iOS cleanup methods can't fix.
About This Article
IDN Media's livestream gift feature had a memory leak. When animations played multiple times on the same ViewController, memory kept growing even after calling removeFromSuperview() and setting variables to nil.
Timotius Leonardo Lianoto's team fixed it by wrapping LottieAnimationView instances in a container UIView class. This isolated the animation's reference cycle so memory could be properly freed when the container was removed.
Memory usage dropped right after animation playback ended when using the container pattern. This prevented the excessive memory consumption that was causing app crashes during long livestream sessions.