You know why I like React Native? Because the documentation is incomplete. This gives me an excuse to dig in to the React Native codebase and honestly tell my boss that I'm working, not just entertaining myself.¹

Just the other day I discovered that the LayoutAnimation API (partially documented here and here) allows you to set a delay on the animation. Here's an example of how:

    //all duration/delay values are in ms
    const myCustomAnimationConfig = {
        duration: 300,
        update: {
            delay: 500,
            type: LayoutAnimation.Types.easeInEaseOut
        },
        create: {
            delay: 300,
            type: LayoutAnimation.Types.easeInEaseOut
        },
        delete: {
            delay: 100,
            type: LayoutAnimation.Types.easeInEaseOut
        }
    };
    LayoutAnimation.configureNext(myCustomAnimationConfig);

Pretty cool, right?

Credit to Justin Poliachik for this blog post, which helped me work out how this works.