How do I animate View.setVisibility(GONE)

Put the view in a layout if it's not and set android:animateLayoutChanges="true" for that layout.

There doesn't seem to be an easy way to do this through the API, because the animation just changes the rendering matrix of the view, not the actual size. But we can set a negative margin to fool LinearLayout into thinking that the view is getting smaller.

So I'd recommend creating your own Animation class, based on ScaleAnimation, and overriding the "applyTransformation" method to set new margins and update the layout. Like this...

public class Q2634073 extends Activity implements OnClickListener {

    @Override
    protected void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
        super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
        setContentView(R.layout.q2634073);
        findViewById(R.id.item1).setOnClickListener(this);
    }

    @Override
    public void onClick(View view) {
        view.startAnimation(new MyScaler(1.0f, 1.0f, 1.0f, 0.0f, 500, view, true));
    }

    public class MyScaler extends ScaleAnimation {

        private View mView;

        private LayoutParams mLayoutParams;

        private int mMarginBottomFromY, mMarginBottomToY;

        private boolean mVanishAfter = false;

        public MyScaler(float fromX, float toX, float fromY, float toY, int duration, View view,
                boolean vanishAfter) {
            super(fromX, toX, fromY, toY);
            setDuration(duration);
            mView = view;
            mVanishAfter = vanishAfter;
            mLayoutParams = (LayoutParams) view.getLayoutParams();
            int height = mView.getHeight();
            mMarginBottomFromY = (int) (height * fromY) + mLayoutParams.bottomMargin - height;
            mMarginBottomToY = (int) (0 - ((height * toY) + mLayoutParams.bottomMargin)) - height;
        }

        @Override
        protected void applyTransformation(float interpolatedTime, Transformation t) {
            super.applyTransformation(interpolatedTime, t);
            if (interpolatedTime < 1.0f) {
                int newMarginBottom = mMarginBottomFromY
                        + (int) ((mMarginBottomToY - mMarginBottomFromY) * interpolatedTime);
                mLayoutParams.setMargins(mLayoutParams.leftMargin, mLayoutParams.topMargin,
                    mLayoutParams.rightMargin, newMarginBottom);
                mView.getParent().requestLayout();
            } else if (mVanishAfter) {
                mView.setVisibility(View.GONE);
            }
        }

    }

}

The usual caveat applies: because we are overriding a protected method (applyTransformation), this is not guaranteed to work in future versions of Android.