Great questions!
1. Lottie started as a ios hackathon project with our motion designer and me. The idea was to just try and get something out of after effect and simply moving on screen. We ended up getting quite a bit further and wanted to keep working on it.
For a while we were working on it in our spare time.
Airbnb is a great place for open source. Open sourcing code is encouraged by the company. So we made a roadmap of what we wantsd to accomplish, a list of benefits and gains, along with a wish list of future possibilities for lottie and took it to our managers. Basically we pitched it. We also looped in a few product teams and found a handful of small places to use lottie. We also brought on an Abdroid engineer. After this we got approval to move forward with lottie in a 30/70 type fashion. Over all we spent nearly a year, from hackathin to release, on Lottie.
We checked out what others were working on and reached out to bodymovin and squall. I cant remember if we reached out to adobe.
I helped out on design/animation side of things for Lottie. Just to add a little more clarification. When we first saw bodymovin we started working on Lottie very slowly. THEN Squall came out, and I basically begged Marcus Eckert to invite me to the private beta. He graciously did and I showed off Squall to all the engineers, we were very excited about it. But after vetting it and having lots of conversations about putting Squall in our app, we ended up continuing to make our own version so we could have more control in the end. After all, we had made so much progress already, we could see the light at the end of the tunnel and knew we only had a matter of weeks to get something usable. We still do use Squall for its dope After Effects preview app in our design work flow though.
