Animated loading image in picasso-open source projects square/picasso
Picasso doesn’t support animated placeholders unfortunately.
One way you could work around this is to place your ImageView in a FrameLayout with the animated drawable underneath. This way when Picasso loads the image it will load over the top of the animated placeholder, giving the user the intended effect.
Alternatively, you could load the image into a Target. Then you’d have the progress bar showing by default, and when the onBitmapLoaded method is called you can hide it and display the image. You can see a basic implementation of this here