Top Libraries For Android App Development In 2022
Last Updated on: February 21, 2024
Mobile app downloads have seen a massive surge in the year 2021. According to a report by Statista, there were a total of 230 billion app downloads in the year 2021, as compared to the 218 billion app downloads in the year 2020. The mobile app market is towering across the globe and Android continues to win the game by controlling nearly 70% of the share in the mobile OS market
The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic further escalated the demands of mobile apps all over the globe. Be it remote working, online shopping, virtual premiers, events or meets, Android app development got the opportunity to facilitate all of these new demands. Apps like Zoom, Netflix, Slack, etc. saw massive downloads and thus they inspired both businesses and android app developers to create apps of similar functionality.
Today, we see that the market is flooded with video conferencing, remote working, OTT, shopping and other android applications. This sudden wave of opportunities doubled the android app development demands and to support the growing appetite of the market, android app libraries came to the rescue for the developers.
To keep up with these latest trends and the frequently changing demands of users, Android app developers are taking the help of Android app libraries that are comprehensive to address the new challenges.
What are Android App Libraries?
Have you ever been to a library? Libraries are full of books that work as a guide or solution to your particular problem. Whether you want to understand a physics concept or research a historical event, you go to the library and pick out a relevant book.
Android libraries are no different from real libraries. Android libraries are created with the sole purpose of assisting the developers in creating an android app. App libraries consist of useful resources like pre-written codes, source code, resource files, and android manifest files. In short, android libraries consist of everything you need to create an android app.
How Systango Can Help You?
- We provide technical consultancy to startups, enterprises, hedge funds, and banks on how to leverage the power of technology.
- We offer an end-to-end development team for web and mobile development.
- You can hire on-demand tech resources for your development need.
App libraries come as a handy tool when the developer is building multiple apps that use similar components like UI layout, activities, services, etc. Android libraries are compiled as an Android Archive (AAR) file that developers can use as a dependency for different Android app modules.
Android Libraries are a useful tool for speeding up the development process of any Android app. The libraries contain some basic pre-written code that developers can use and implement rather than writing the entire code from scratch.
Top Android App Development Libraries in 2022
There are numerous libraries available for android app development. However, in this blog post, we have included the best libraries to look out for in 2022 for android app development. The libraries are divided into different categories based on their functionality and utility.
Top libraries for Image Loading:
Glide: Glide is a library that helps in making the image uploading and scrolling smoother in an android app. With Glide, you can ensure that the image uploading process is faster and effortless. Glide uses smart automatic downsampling and it re-uses byte arrays to reduce the space overhead.
Picasso: Built by Square, Picasso is an efficient and reliable image library. Picasso simplifies the process of displaying images from an external source. Be it complex image transformations, image view recycling or converting the images, with Picasso, you can perform all these tasks more effortlessly.
Top library for Networking:
Retrofit: Mobile apps often need network communications to perform different tasks. Retrofit is a library that has made the networking process easier by allowing users to add request body, change headers and endpoints, choose request method and add query parameters with the help of annotations. It is a widely used library for networking maintained by Square. It is a type-safe client REST for Java and Android and uses annotations to translate API into the various interfaces.
Top library for Dependency Injection:
Dagger 2: Dependency Injection is a technique used in app development where an object receives a service or a set of services from another object that depends on the former and this process of giving the service is known as “injection”. Dagger 2 is a static dependency injection library that works for both Android and Java. An upgraded version of Dagger, Dagger 2 uses Java annotations to estimate and analyse dependencies.
Top library for View Binding
Butterknife: View Binding is a process that allows developers to write code that can interact easily with views. View binding helps in reducing boilerplate code while assigning views to developed variables. Butterknife is a popular library for view-binding used by Android app developers. Developed by Jake Wharton, Butterknife uses annotations to generate boilerplate codes. With Butterknife, developers can save a lot of time and effort by avoiding writing repetitive codes. It is a useful library that helps the developers in binding strings, click-events, dimens.xml, etc.
Top libraries for Testing
Espresso: Testing is essential to ensure the quality and functionality of your mobile application. Therefore, certain testing libraries help in testing different aspects of mobile applications. Espresso is one such testing library that mainly focuses on testing the user interface of mobile apps. With Espresso, developers can create tests and analyse whether TextView matches other text.
JUnit: Another type of app testing is unit testing. Unit testing refers to testing the individual units of a source code. With unit testing, developers can test the smaller portions of the mobile application to achieve accuracy. JUnit is one such library that is quite efficient for unit testing. With JUnit, developers can use a set of assert methods to check the actual result against the expected result. JUnit uses heavy annotations and is quite reliable for unit testing.
Top library for Crash Reporting:
Crash Reporter: It often occurs that while using certain features of an android app, it suddenly crashes. These crashes can deteriorate the quality of an android app and hamper the user experience. Therefore, reporting the crashes becomes a vital process. Crash Reporter is an android library that captures the app crashes and saves them locally so that developers can get the crash report instantly and start working on the debugging and improvement of the mobile app.
These are some of the top Android app development libraries to look out for in 2022. With these libraries, you can develop android apps easily and effortlessly. Android app libraries are responsible for bringing efficiency to the app development process by substantially reducing the time taken to develop an android app.
How Systango Can Help You?
- We provide technical consultancy to startups, enterprises, hedge funds, and banks on how to leverage the power of technology.
- We offer an end-to-end development team for web and mobile development.
- You can hire on-demand tech resources for your development need.
Summing up, android app development is growing exponentially and app libraries are indeed playing a huge role in it. Android app libraries provide developers with some ease while developing an app. With the libraries mentioned above, you can effortlessly keep up with the changing trends of android app development.
Android app developers at Systango are equipped with all the required skills to make the best use of Android libraries. We utilize Android libraries to deliver robust, intuitive and seamless android apps that help to improve the bottom line of your business.
