No, Lottie uses json files from an After Effects exetension called bodymovin. Maybe in the future someone will write an exporter for another program that can plugin!
Yea I see what you're saying. We built on top of bodymovin which was an already open source. Hernan put a ton of work into it that we were able to stand on top of. We wouldn't have even started Lottie without his project.
Personally I think theres plenty of room for all three, Lottie, Squall and Keyframes.
We still use Squall here at Airbnb because Squall has some things to offer that Lottie doesn't. The After Effects preview app is really dope, and we'll never make one of those. We may not use it in our codebase, but to anyone wanting to seriously use Lottie I would recommend buying Squall so you can preview on your device so easy.
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.
