Animated Gradient Border Ring

A rotating gradient ring, masked to a border

The ring is not a stroke, and it is not a mask either. It is a gradient painted across the whole widget with an opaque surface parked on top of its middle; the ring is the gap that surface does not cover. Everything rests on modifier order — the gradient has to be drawn outside the padding that insets the surface, or it never reaches the gap at all.

// reconstructed, not lifted: the shipped component orders these differently — see the recorded
// suspicion below. The transition, the brush and the radius are the source's.
val transition = rememberInfiniteTransition(label = "ring")
val degrees by transition.animateFloat(
    initialValue = 0f,
    targetValue = 360f,
    animationSpec = infiniteRepeatable(
        animation = tween(durationMillis = oneCycleMillis, easing = LinearEasing),
        repeatMode = RepeatMode.Restart,
    ),
    label = "ringAngle",
)
val grow by animateFloatAsState(if (isAnimated) 1f else 0f, tween(800))

Box(
    modifier = Modifier
        .clip(shape)                  // 1. confine the gradient to the outline
        .drawBehind {                 // 2. paint it across the WHOLE box, gap included
            scale(scale = grow) {
                rotate(degrees = degrees) {
                    drawCircle(brush = brush, radius = size.width)   // no blendMode at all
                }
            }
        }
        .padding(borderWidth),        // 3. only what follows this is inset
) {
    Surface(color = backgroundColor, shape = shape) { content() }    // 4. covers the middle
}

drawBehind sits before padding on purpose: a draw modifier measures whatever is inside it, so one placed after the padding is handed the inner size and cannot paint the border gap however it blends. radius = size.width is deliberate too — a sweep gradient at the default radius (minDimension / 2) leaves the corners of a wide box unlit.

For a ring that runs a fixed number of turns and stops, keep the same draw and gate it — but gate the drawing, not the transition, and key the effect on the flag:

// adapted
var running by rememberSaveable { mutableStateOf(false) }
LaunchedEffect(isAnimated) {                    // NOT LaunchedEffect(true)
    if (isAnimated) {
        running = true
        delay(cycles * oneCycleMillis.toLong())
        running = false
    }
}

Traps

Order is the mechanism, and no blend mode substitutes for it. drawBehind { … } paints before the node's own content; drawWithContent { drawContent(); … } paints after. With no blend, that ordering is the entire effect. With a blend it decides whether the blend has a destination — and the arithmetic is worth doing before reaching for one. On premultiplied colour SrcIn is Result = Src × Dst.a: the destination contributes nothing but its alpha, used as a mask. Point that at an opaque surface inset by padding(borderWidth) and you get the exact inverse of a ring — alpha is 0 in the gap, so the gradient is erased precisely where the border belongs, and 1 across the face, so it survives precisely where it should not. Draw the gradient first into a fresh layer instead and the destination is empty everywhere, so SrcIn paints nothing whatsoever. The blend that would carve a ring is SrcOut (Result = Src × (1 − Dst.a)), and only over a layer spanning the un-padded box, so that "outside the destination" means the gap. The version above needs neither, which is why it is the one to reach for.

CompositingStrategy.Offscreen is what gives a blend a scope, and the scope is what it costs. A blend composites against whatever is already in the buffer it draws into; without the layer that buffer is the parent's, so the result shifts with the background and can reach outside the widget's own bounds. With the layer it is confined — at one offscreen buffer per instance, redrawn every frame. That is a per-widget cost, fine on a hero element and not on every row of a list. Skip the blend and you skip the buffer.

The border width is the padding, not a stroke width. Two consequences. The inner surface must be opaque — hand it a transparent container colour and the gradient shows straight through the middle, which is a gradient blob, not a ring. (The shipped component swaps in an opaque black behind the content while animating, for exactly this reason.) And the outer clip and the inner surface must use the same shape, or the gap width drifts around the corners.

An infinite transition runs whenever it is composed. rememberInfiniteTransition() created unconditionally at the top of the composable keeps requesting frames for every instance on screen, whether or not the ring is drawn — a row of chips is a row of frame loops. Scaling the ring to zero hides it without stopping anything. If the effect is rare, put the animated variant behind a branch so the transition is not composed at all.

LaunchedEffect(true) never re-runs. A fixed-cycle variant whose countdown is keyed on a constant starts once, at first composition. An instance that mounts with the flag off and turns it on later — the usual case, since the flag is normally "loading" or "selected" — never animates, and nothing about the code looks wrong.

RepeatMode.Reverse is not a rotation. It runs the angle back down, so the ring visibly swings instead of turning. Restart, from 0f to 360f, is a seamless loop for an angle — for anything else Restart is the one that jumps.

A sweep gradient has a seam. The last colour meets the first at the start angle. Two colours show a hard edge sweeping past; a list that begins and ends on the same colour hides it.

Recorded suspicion: the shipped component is ordered the other way. That InfiniteBorderAnimationView puts its draw modifiers after padding(borderWidth) and blends SrcIn from drawBehind — by the arithmetic above that has no destination alpha to keep and no access to the gap, so it should paint nothing. It is nonetheless the code on screen, so treat this as a reading of it rather than a bug report. Chip(isAnimated = true, isSelected = true) is the one live call site; one screenshot of a selected animated chip settles both the shipped order and the order taught here. Take it before changing anything.

Related: shimmer-skeleton-loaders drives a brush from the same kind of infinite transition without a layer; liquid-glass-backdrop is the other effect in this family where the surface's own geometry, not its position, decides what you see.

Verifying it

# every offscreen layer, then whether a blend is near it (proximity only — the first list is truth)
grep -rn "CompositingStrategy.Offscreen" --include="*.kt" .
grep -rn -A12 "CompositingStrategy.Offscreen" --include="*.kt" . | grep "BlendMode"

# frame loops: each hit runs for as long as it is composed
grep -rn "rememberInfiniteTransition" --include="*.kt" .

# effects that can never re-run
grep -rn "LaunchedEffect(true)" --include="*.kt" .

A layer with no blend near it is either a deliberate alpha-compositing fix or a buffer being paid for nothing — open each one. Then, by hand: put the widget over a dark and a light background in turn (a ring that changes with the background is not confined to its layer), and toggle the flag after the screen is up rather than starting with it on — that is the state the constant-keyed effect gets wrong.