Here in Portugal, most display useful info like date, time, outside temperature (with varying degrees of accuracy), as well as services provided by the pharmacy or some general (often season specific) health recommendation.
The use of a bright green sign is, of course, to seek attention, but it's also useful to quickly spot an open place at night, when most are closed and only a few remain opened longer in each town/city neighborhood (called "farmácias de serviço", i.e something like "pharmacies in service"; they usually rotate between themselves each week). Nowadays you can check which places are available at night through a nice website, but the signs remain a useful thing, nonetheless.
The animations are just a culture thing now, I'd guess. Different pharmacies employ different animations, some wackier, some less, though there are very common animations for sure, such as the one where a 3D cross is animated rotating on multiple axis at the same time, making a nice spin back to its original position.
Why? I dunno, they break up the usual info display and help grab attention? I dunno, you get used to it and it mostly gets filtered into the background hehe
StreetComplete is godsend. Editing OSM in JOSM, iD, etc, is not trivial and involves reading a lot of documentation and forum posts (if you care to do things right), which of course isn't anywhere near practical for small devices when you're on the go, surveying.
This app changed my whole routine. The interface is really solid and helps the community target important tasks, rewarding it with little prizes. Althewhile, the gamification is kept at a very healthy level, to avoid attracting leaderboard seekers and whatnot, which would certainly lower the quality of contributions.
I think the contribution day grid (akin to GitHub's thing) as well as the dynamic category explorer, the badges and the OSM-related projects it reveals to you bit by bit really bring everything together. It's an incredible tool!
For the experienced (and this is not said lightly), there is the expert version, which adds more advanced editing features for those looking for a bit more control in regular SC.