Pose is deprecated
Over a year ago I joined Framer to help write the next version of their animation API. This resulted in the release of Framer Motion, a production-ready, declarative animation library for React.
It takes Popmotion, which is a low-level, unopinionated animation library, and wraps it in a super-simple API that lowers the time and knowledge investment required for people to make beautifully animated websites.
This raised a problem in that I’d already written a library that did pretty much that that: Pose.
In the broadest strokes the two work quite similarly. Framer Motion just does more, a lot simpler, in roughly the same bundle size.
The key difference between the two is that supporting Pose as an open source library was an untenable situation for me. OSS funding is completely broken and without it, maintainers are going to burn out at some point.
It’s refreshing to work on Framer Motion because it powers the animations both within the Framer UI and those created by its users. The same way Facebook’s dogfooding of React leads to its continued investment, the same is true of Framer Motion. This is a much healthier product.
So we positioned it as the “successor to Pose”, and React Pose was deprecated.
A carnival of flavours
Pose was written as a configurable abstraction that was easy adapt for different view libraries. Relatively quickly we ended up with React Pose, React Native Pose, and Vue Pose. There was even an unreleased React 360 Pose.
However, React Pose was always the primary focus. At its peak, it was generating over 100k downloads a week. React Native Pose has sat at around 4.5k downloads, while Vue Pose has never breached 2k. Vanishingly small in comparison.
It was easy to write the different Pose implementations, but the resulting abstraction tree meant that it was a nightmare to maintain them over time. I chose the wrong abstractions and there’s probably a deep dive retrospective on that topic alone.
Given the relative audience sizes and my lack of free time for open source, when I officially deprecated React Pose, I effectively deprecated the lot. Since then there’s been no updates to the React Native or Vue flavours and there won’t be in the future. So today I’m making it official.
What next?
React Pose users already have an upgrade path in Framer Motion, and can follow the official migration guide.
I would love to write a React Native version of Framer Motion, but there’s plenty of cool animation-related features to write for Framer that will take priority.
It’s also hard to gauge demand - the Pose download numbers above paint an unfortunate but possible incomplete picture. If you’re interested in a React Native version let us know on the GitHub ticket.
As for Vue Pose, there are no current plans for a Vue Framer Motion and I suspect there won’t be.
All these libraries will continue to be available on npm, and the documentation will continue to be found in the footer on this site. I just won’t be releasing updates to the code, so they may break in future backwards-incompatible releases of their respective view libraries.
The code itself will be accessible in the Popmotion master branch for at least another month but beyond that you might need to go spelunking in the repo history if you want to fork it.
Popmotion itself has a much brighter future. Framer Motion’s existence and upcoming Framer product requirements has opened up space and created demand for Popmotion to become even lower-level, even more unopinionated, so look forward to these changes in the future.