Is it possible to play GIF format in Android?

Question

I want to add play gif format to my android app. Could this be done, and how would I do it?

Answer 1

It seems that playing animated GIFs is not supported directly in Android. The Google docs state the GIF is a discouraged file type for using in your Android projects.

There are some possibilities but they all seem to require a great deal of work to show your animated GIFs.
The one thing that seems to be working is splitting up the GIF into its frame and do the animation between the frames yourself, see this question for a little bit more information. There is also this question that shows another way but the answer may be outdated because of the changes made in the cupcake release that are mentioned in the other questsion.

Answer 2

Animated GIFs are supported since Android Froyo (2.2).

Earlier versions does not support animated GIFS out of the box. You can take a look at the Android Issue 3422 for more details.