In T97465#1505235, @Dbrant wrote:

This ticket is one among many in our Bug Backlog, and is currently not a high priority. It is, however, relatively high in the order of the backlog, which means that we should be getting around to it soon.

This issue has been here since April. Splash Screens were only very recently added to the Material Design guidelines and somehow one was added to the Wikipedia Beta application in the very recent update. Could you explain how the Bug Backlog works? Shouldn't bugs be fixed before adding new features?

If fixing bugs took absolute priority over adding new features, then there would never be time to add new features. Our resources are very limited, so we try to strike a balance between delivering new features and fixing outstanding issues.

We added the splash screen because, without it, the system shows a bright white screen, which is especially jarring for users of our Dark mode. The issue described in this ticket, on the other hand, is significantly less prominent (I dare say almost undetectable to all but the most discerning eye), and was therefore weighed accordingly when prioritizing our work.

And I'll mention again: the app is open-source, so we'll be happy to see a patch from an outside contributor that might fix this issue.
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Apps/Team/Wikipedia_Android_app_hacking

Change 246778 had a related patch set uploaded (by Dbrant):
No longer do the spinny-arrow animation on the hamburger icon.

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/246778

Change 246778 merged by jenkins-bot:
No longer do the spinny-arrow animation on the hamburger icon.

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/246778

I compared 2.0.131-alpha-2015-10-16 with 2.0.111-r-2015-09-16 on Android 5x and 4x - the spinning arrow animation is not present.