@RHo that's a cool and modern solution. I can give a hand with it when I am back from my holidays :)

The design looks great! Would love to see it in live action.

Let's make sure we separate the two types of "loading" progress that we're referring to:

1. The "loading" W screen when the app is first launched by the system.
   • Cold-launching directly from tapping the app icon to seeing a "live" activity (as proposed in the animated gif) is not really possible, because this is the time during which the system itself loads the app into memory. All apps have a version of this kind of screen, and it's unavoidable. During this time, the system permits the app to display some very minimal graphics to represent the app's brand, but not much more. It's not advised (or possible?) to have complex animations during this time, since this will detract from the time it takes the system to finish loading the app.
   • This is independent of any network requests (because the app isn't loaded yet), but it is dependent on the horsepower of the device, i.e. less-powerful devices will display the loading screen for a longer time.
   • We could potentially compose a fake "screenshot" of the feed (with placeholder cards), and use that as the loading graphic. However, this might look weird across different aspect ratios.

2. The empty state of the Feed while the network request is in progress which fetches the feed contents.
   • This is the "loading" progress when the main activity has finished launching and makes its initial network request to fetch the feed contents. (this is the "skeleton screen" to which the Smashing Magazine article refers.)
   • During this period, we can indeed show placeholder cards in the feed which mimic the expected structure of the final cards.
   • However, by the nature of how the system works, this can only be shown after the app has been fully loaded, i.e. after the initial launch screen (1) is finished.

Perhaps we should un-merge the task to handle case (2), namely T124811, and make this task focus specifically on the initial loading graphic?

Makes sense @Dbrant - will unmerge and post this onto T124811.

Change 415616 had a related patch set uploaded (by Dbrant; owner: Dbrant):
[apps/android/wikipedia@master] Update launch screen graphic.

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/415616

Change 415616 merged by jenkins-bot:
[apps/android/wikipedia@master] Update launch screen graphic.

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/415616

LGTM on 2.7.231-alpha-2018-04-05