Android remains to be the most popular and widely used operating system for smartphone users around the world. Naturally, most app developers now are in favour of giving priority to Android app development over apps for iOS or desktop platforms or the web. This is also why every Android app development company must deal with huge competition. They must be meticulous in choosing the correct SDKs, libraries and frameworks for their projects.
To make things easier for them, we will showcase the top SDKs, libraries, and frameworks used in Android app projects in 2023.
Kotlin
The official programming language for Android development is Kotlin, and Google has launched it as a superior alternative to Java. It is unique and powerful, including statically typed coding, interoperability with Java, low code footprint, better app security and many others.
Here we mention some of the important strengths, capabilities and features Kotlin is known for.
Kotlin code is concise and clean due to the lack of boilerplate code.
Kotlin comes with a Null Safety feature, which gives freedom from NullPointerException.
Kotlin for Java developers doesn’t increase any learning curve as Kotlin code is fully interoperable with Java.
An extremely easy-to-use command line helps developers build Android apps faster.
Ionic
As the most popular hybrid development framework, Ionic allows for quickly building highly reliable apps. Integrated testing tools, drag-and-drop development functions, Ionic UI components, easy-to-integrate design files, and many more make Ionic versatile.
Some of the Ionic framework’s essential features, strengths and capabilities include the following.
You can easily extend your Android app in the future with cross-platform functionality.
Ionic relies on trusted and tested web technologies such as CSS, HTML, and JavaScript.
It is fully component-based and integration ready to ensure faster development.
It has a little learning curve and offers everything out of the box to shape a high-performance app project.
Flutter
Flutter is the leading cross-platform UI development toolkit that enjoys the highest popularity among all frameworks and libraries now and in 2023. It uses Dart programming language and offers a component-based development environment allowing you to shape the UIs with many native widgets.
The most important strengths, capabilities and features Flutter is known for are below.
Flutter offers a free and open-source SDK powered by Google’s support.
Flutter uses a performance-focused, low-footprint and reliable Dart language.
Flutter offers the hot reload feature to help developers and the QA team evaluate the changes in code in running apps, which saves time and resources.
Flutter comes with a vast repository of Android UI widgets that follow the Material Design principle of Android.
Flutter offers support to an extensive range of development environments or IDEs.
Flutter uses the Dart language, known for its low code footprint and minor coding errors or bugs.
Flutter also offers integrated backend development functions with Google Firebase.
React Native
React Native is regarded to be the most popular cross-platform and native application development framework. It uses JavaScript as the coding language and offers a component-based dynamic architecture. Having been the leading framework for app development for years, it is now the second in popularity, following Flutter.
Some of the essential features, capabilities and strengths that made React Native popular among Android developers are mentioned below.
Optimum code reusability across multiple projects and platforms.
It ensures fantastic code rendering for the native Android experience.
It comes with inbuilt tools for the smooth identification of bugs and errors.
The help of Node Packet Manager (NPM) helps bring down the learning curve.
The live reload feature allows real-time code changes and evaluation.
Xamarin
Xamarin is one of the most reliable mobile application development frameworks on which Android app projects frequently rely. It is free and open-source and ensures robust development with everything you need to perfect an app.
Some of the most notable features, strengths and capabilities of Xamarin for Android development are mentioned below.
Xamarin allows extending the core codebase across multiple projects thanks to its “write once, run everywhere” approach.
The framework enjoys the excellent support of Microsoft and the vast support of the developer community.
Xamarin offers everything for faster development and app rollout with many integrated tools.
Xamarin insight continues to give developers more profound insights into user activities and ways to improve user experience.
Corona SDK
Corona SDK is another widely popular mobile app development framework that Android game app developers widely use. It uses a unique programming language called LUA, which is easy to learn and tremendously versatile in capabilities.
Below are some of the most notable features, strengths and capabilities that make Corona SDK popular among Android developers.
It is fully open-source, free and completely community-supported.
It offers a very manageable learning curve despite allowing you to create layouts for complex systems.
The Android app can be easily extended to iOS and the web with reusable code.
It offers powerful OpenGL graphics capabilities.
The LUA language is known for low-footprint code, and this ensures efficiency.
Appcelerator Titanium
Appcelerator Titanium is a widely popular SDK that relies upon tried and tested web languages like HTML, JavaScript, and CSS. The apps built using this SDK perform quite similarly to apps developed using native technologies.
The following are some of the awesome features and strengths of Appcelerator Titanium that made it popular for Android development.
It is an easily extensible, open-source, accessible and versatile SDK.
It comes with a rich code module capable of reducing the load of excess code.
It comes with a plethora of native Android UI components.
Dagger
When you want a simple Android development framework for simple and basic Android smartphones, it is the one you can choose. It has been developed to make things easier for quick development needs.
Dagger uses annotations for simplifying development processes. Created to cater to low-end smartphone devices, Dagger makes everything straightforward for Android app projects. Easy-to-read code makes Dagger popular among Android developers.
Retrofit
You can opt for this if you want to know about one leading network library. This essential HTTP library is explicitly created for Java and Android. If, as a developer, you are just starting your journey, you will find this easy and efficient.
The best thing about this is that it supports most of the leading and well-known serialisation libraries. Developers can choose among these libraries based on their project requirements. Most importantly, the tool is also effective in uploading JSN and recovering the same.
Fresco
For many Android app developers, faster loading of images always remains a crucial concern; Fresco comes to the rescue for them. With the goal of loading images faster and better, this library has become a steeple choice for many Android app projects.
Created and supported by Facebook, it ensures optimum quality focus and awesome technical support. The best thing about this framework is that it keeps the app’s performance intact when performing its duties.
Firebase analytics
As you already know, Android developers, while using Flutter and a few other frameworks, can easily access the Firebase plugin for backend development support. But this analytics and reporting tool from Google Firebase is a must-have for any Android app project.
To have a detailed view and understanding of how app visitors engage and interact with the app, you always need a robust analytics and reporting tool. And this is where Firebase Analytics does an impressive job for you. The tool will help track users from their first entry point to the last exit step and bring you all the patterns and insights.
Crashlytics
Analysing app crashes and non-responsive instances is another crucial requirement for any ambitious Android app project. Though multiple crash reporting and analysis tools exist, Crashlytics is more robust and efficient. Hence we must take advantage of this in our present list.
According to most Android app developers, it is the most well-equipped and efficient crash analyser and reporting tool to detect and report all the errors and fault lines that lead to crashing. It can easily detect the faulty code responsible for the crashes and any other erroneous responses so that you can make the changes and prevent them. Most importantly, Crashlytics comes as absolutely free and open-source for app developers.
Ending Notes
We hope that you found the above reading helpful for your upcoming Android app project or any other project. We have presented some of the most acclaimed mobile application development frameworks, SDKs and libraries that stood the test of time.
In this respect, it is noteworthy that every technology or tool is distinct, and each of them has different features and capabilities. Naturally, they must be in a different line with the goal of every app project. So, you need to pick from these technologies and tools based on the nature and objectives of your app.
Libraries for Android App Development
What are Android libraries?
In brief, Android frameworks and libraries (or just libraries in general), are a set of implementations of behavior that are written in programming languages and have a well-defined interface.
These libraries generally include documentation, configuration data, message templates, help data, pre-written code and subroutines, values, classes, to name a few.
Libraries play a major role in the development of any framework. It reduces the efforts to develop the things we use most often during the development. Thanks to authors and a large developer community, we have countless libraries available with us.
It is being said that the number of libraries available for frameworks shows its popularity in the community. Let’s discuss the library that we are using here at Ozosoft.
At Google I/O 2018, Google has announced a collection of libraries for native Android app development. It helps us follow best practices, reduce boilerplate code, and write code that works consistently across Android versions and devices. Below is the chart of libraries we are using most often while developing an Android app.
Dependency Injector Library
Dependency injection (DI) is a method that is broadly used in programming for Android development. One can create a good Android library architecture for apps by following the principles of DI.
You get the following benefits for using Android libraries for Dependency Injection:
- Reusability of code
- Ease of testing
- Ease of refactoring
1. Dagger 2
One of the great things about Dagger 2 is that it majorly relies on using Java annotation processors along with compile-time to estimate and analyze dependencies. On the contrary, other Java dependency injection libraries suffer from limitations such as relying on XML, incurring performance penalties during startup, or facing validating dependency issues at run-time.
Another advantage of Dagger 2 is that it simplifies access to shared instances. For example, once you declare in Dagger the singleton instances like MyTwitterApiClient or SharedPreferences, you can easily declare fields with a simple @Inject annotation:
Networking Libraries
Here are the tools that you need for establishing any kind of network communication within the Android app.
2. Retrofit
Retrofit is a type-safe REST client for Android and Java, intelligently mapping an API into a client interface with the help of annotations. Previously, if you wanted to make a network request, you needed to execute an Async task class and then use HttpsUrlConnection in order to fetch data, something that was not ideal when dealing with APIs returning large data. This is now resolved by Retrofit.
One can effortlessly manipulate endpoints and headers, add a request body and query parameters, and select request methods – all with just annotations in Retrofit. Moreover, this Android library also takes care of parsing POJOs by using converters.
Start by adding dependency to your apps build.gradle file –
After adding the dependency to your app build.gradle file, you must add a dependency for converters that you intend to employ.
3. Activity Recognition API
This API permits a user to recognize their present activity, such as strolling, driving, or standing still. Android developers, who are utilizing this library, can demand updates on activity by pressing the ‘Request Updates’ button and quit getting updates utilizing the ‘Eliminate Updates’ button.
Additionally, the sample utilizes an IntentService to handle identified activity changes, which are sent utilizing ActivityRecognitionResultobjects. The IntentService will get a total rundown of likely identified exercises and broadcast them through a BroadcastReceiver.
4. EventBus
While creating an Android app that has various dynamic components, you may be dealing with various issues when communicating with each other. EventBus is probably the best library that was principally made to take care of this issue utilizing the publisher/subscriber design.
This Android framework and library has worked on and simplified the communication between parts, decouples, event senders, and collectors. Additionally, performs well with Activities, Fragments, and background threads. Every one of the various classes that are associated with this library are totally decoupled from one another, prompting code that is less complex and easier to keep up and troubleshoot.
In addition, it has some high level advanced features like delivery threads and subscriber needs. It avoids complex and error-prone dependencies and life cycle issues.
Image Loading Libraries
Image loading libraries are a knight in shining armor combating the problem of “out memory errors” in Android apps caused by loading multiple images at a time. Let’s look at the best Android libraries options out there in this category.
5. Picasso
Maintained by Square, Picasso is a trusted and widely used Android image library. Picasso claims to allow for hassle-free image loading in the application—often in one line of code.
Some of the pitfalls that Picasso takes care of include handling ImageView recycling and downloading cancellation in an adapter, facilitating complex image transformations using minimal memory, automatic memory, and caching.
Additional features that makes Picasso a popular choice among Android app developers are –
- Picasso automatically detects adapter re-use and the previously canceled download.
- It easily and effectively transforms images to make them fit better into layouts and reduce memory size.
- For more advanced effects, one can specify custom transformations.
6. Glide
Glide is yet another praised image loader and one of the best new Android libraries for developers, managed by Bumptech. Not just this, but it is also recommended straight by Google.
Glide not only provides animated GIF support while handling image loading and caching but also helps in fetching, decoding, displaying video calls, images, and these GIFs. It also includes a flexible API allowing developers and programmers to plug in any network stack, as its default stack is HttpUrlConnection.
This library primarily aims at making the scrolling process for any list of images as smooth as it can be. More so, it is also effective in case you need to fetch, resize, or even display a remote image.
Scanning Libraries
In order to integrate scanning features while developing custom Android apps and increase their functionality level, developers prefer the below-mentioned libraries.
7. Zxing
Acronym for ‘Zebra Crossing’, ZXing is a barcode image-processing Android library that is implemented in Java, with ports to other programming languages. This library also has support for the 1D product, 1D industrial, and 2D barcodes.
Google also uses ZXing in order to make millions of barcodes indexable on the web. It also forms the basis of Android’s Barcode Scanner app and is integrated into Google Book Search and Google Product.
8. CAMView
This is an effective alternative to the ZXing barcode scanner. It is an Android camera easy access library with an embedded QR scanner which is based on ZXing.
CamView library possesses a set of components (views in simple words) which are set to be put to your layout files, allowing developers and giving immediate access to-
- Live preview video feed from the device camera
- Scanning barcodes with the help of ZXing’s built-in decoding engine
- To perform your own camera live data processing
View Binding Libraries
The need for view binding libraries first surfaced when the need to reduce the boilerplate code when assigning views to variables arose. As a matter of fact, the number of Android support libraries worth mentioning for this purpose is numbered and two of the most prominent of them are:
9. ButterKnife
Developed by Jake Wharton, ButterKnife is a renowned view binding Android support library helping in assigning ids to views very effortlessly, hence avoiding the excess of findViewByid. The statement- “Butterknife is like Dagger only infinitely less sharp” signifies that view binding is sort of dependency injection. The only difference is that in ButterKnife annotations are employed to generate boilerplate code.
The code below shows that ButterKnife eliminates the need for things like onClick and onTouch while replacing them with auto injected code.
10. Android Databinding
In-built to the Android Support Library, the Android Databinding library requires the least of Android Studio Version 1.3 in order to work. Unlike ButterKnife, this view-binding library for Android does not use annotations. It allows you to bind UI components in the layouts to data sources in the app with the help of declarative format instead of programmatically.
Here layouts are defined in activities with code that needs UI framework methods, i.e., look at the code below. It calls findViewById() to find the TextView widget while binding it to the userName property of the variable viewModel.