If you need to correctly play GIFs in Android I suppose you should use a third library, because the framework doesn't support the format natively. A couple of projects you could be interested in are
ImageViewEx: Extension of Android's ImageView that supports animated GIFs and includes a better density management
ION: Android Asynchronous Networking Made Easy. Got the GIF support few days ago and is explicitly suited for downloading and showing remote GIFs.