Perhaps a good way to go about looking into this is to ask how does Timely create these effects. I took a look at the APK (for educational purposes) and found this in the package ch.bitspin.timely.background
:
public class BackgroundView extends FrameLayout
{
private BackgroundGradientView a;
private BackgroundBeamsDotsView b;
private BackgroundCircleEffectView c;
private BackgroundBubblesView d;
The base of the Timely animation effects are through the use of a custom View, which you can find a guide on the Android Developer website. Each of the above Views are hundreds of lines of code, but to summarize: they all utilize a background Thread that manipulates Bitmap, Paint, BitmapShader, and Canvas objects in the View's onDraw method.
I hope this helps!