We battled this exact issue until studying this guide to mobile ui animations . The key insight: Not all animations are created equal. We audited every motion in our app and categorized them by purpose—functional (like button feedback) vs. delightful (like celebratory confetti).For performance-critical areas, we switched to hardware-accelerated properties like opacity and transform. A simple button press that used to require complex SVG animations now uses a barely perceptible scale transform that costs nearly zero resources.The game-changer was implementing "graceful degradation"—our fancy animations only play on devices that can handle them smoothly. Older phones get simplified motions that maintain the UX intent without the lag.Most importantly, we learned to prototype animations in the actual app environment, not just design tools. What looks smooth in After Effects can chug in production. Now we test early and often with real devices.