saul Accessibility wise, yes it makes total sense. However (correct me if I'm wrong), with accessibility you aren't supposed to be confused as to whether it is a bug or not. If the intention is what you speak of, the bug doesn't exactly lie in the existence of the animation, but the animation itself. Instead of being a clear indicator that the focus has moved to the text, or even suggesting that the text is already focused, it just flashes the text moving back to center implying that it is glitching trying to un-focus the text.
I understand how this is working too (it is not intended).
When you click anything other than the LocationBarTextView it tries to change the focus of the search bar to being in idle (ie: No one is gonna be typing in it) However, where you're clicking matters because clicking the LocationBar changes the state of the search bar to focused. The problem is that two animations are trying to go at once, and the optimal call stack will cause the search bar to lose focus first. That causes the one triggered by the LocationBar to be invalidated, and instead of the properties being animated back to the side, it just teleports there as the time in the animation context has passed anyways.
I can't see this as being intended anyways as it requires you to click in obscure places to trigger.
All of this is up for speculation but that's just my opinion.