Android App Dev: Which Are The Six Best Libraries?

What are Android libraries?

In general, Android frameworks and libraries are a set of implementations of behavior written in codes with a clearly defined interface. Android app developers can use these libraries to configure data, documentation, message templates, help data, classes and values, to name a few. 

Why do we need Android Libraries?

One of the most prominent reasons for using libraries is that it helps in the optimization of the Android app development process. This means developing an amazing application without any additional and unnecessary effort. Android libraries for the developers provide them with some basic pre-written codes and other important components that can be used by the developers rather than doing tasks from scratch.  

Therefore, for someone who is in Android app creation and needs to know about the important libraries that are important in every mobile app development company, this article would be what you need. 

● Android Retrofit

Retrofit is a type-safe HTTP client for Kotlin, Android and Java that allows you to set up REST APIs for interfaces. Retrofit by Square offers effective authentication and interaction frameworks. 

It is very easy to find JSON or XML data from a web API with this library. This supports simple Jackson, XML and other types of data structures. This latest version, Retrofit 2, has added a new internal API and a number of new features.  

This has been built as the networking layer on top of OkHttp. Retrofit is used by Android developers considering its better functionality and speed, and simple syntax. 

● ExpansionPanel

The ExpansionPanel holds many features and allows the developers to implement expansion panels that include light edits and flow creation. Additionally, it provides more than ten expanded layouts for each individual user. Furthermore, since the project includes a sample program to test, it gets easy to understand. 

Other advantages include the provision of Android libraries in the Apache-2.0 license, and the code samples can be found on Google play. 

● Picasso

Picasso by Square is a widely used and trusted image library for Android. Picasso has claimed to enable smooth image loading in the application, mostly in one line of code. Some of the issues that Picasso addresses are handling ImageView downloading cancellation and recycling, facilitating complex image transformation with minimal memory, and caching.

Furthermore, Picasso can automatically detect adapter re-use and the previously canceled download. Also, it can transform the images so that they fit perfectly into layouts with minimum memory usage. An additional feature that makes Picasso a preferred choice among Android app developers is that it allows custom transformations.

● Glide

Glide, by Bumptech, is one more image loader and also a great Android library for developers. And not only this but it is also recommended directly by Google. Also, glide can not only provide animated GIF support while handling image caching and loading but also helps in decoding, fetching, and displaying images as well as video calls. 

Moreover, this includes flexible APIs that allow the developers and programmers to plug into any of the network stacks, with the default stack being HttpUrlConnection. Also, it is effective in case you need to resize, fetch, or display the remote image. 

● My Little Canvas

This comes under the most highly regarded Android libraries. The library allows working with Canvas for Android, and objects can be used instead of methods. 

As a renowned Android-supported library, My Litlle Canvas provides an underlining feature in Text View. Another benefit here is this toolkit is that it allows the creation in Canvas of curved lines, text shapes, and reshapable shapes. 

● Robolectric

Other unparalleled unit testing libraries include Roboelectric, handling inflation of resource loading, and views and including other things as well. This can make the tests created in the library more efficient in performing functions that real devices with Android framework dependencies perform. 

● ButterKnife

ButterKnife is used to build a highly scalable mobile app library and further, it is annotation based. View binding could be great for android developers. Also, butterknife can help the developer in creating drawable and bindable strings to the views and other data sources. This library is highly beneficial for use in any application. Because of this Android library, onTouch and onClick are not important. 

● Espresso

An Android testing support library for testing, Espresso allows developers to build interface tests for Android applications. With Espresso, android app developers write tests and verify if a TextView is the same as some other text or not. It imparts the impression as if a real user is using the application, and it runs on emulators as well as real devices. Developers need to add dependencies to the app build in order to use espresso. 

● Stetho

Introduced by Facebook, Stetho is an Android library that makes it possible to debug applications from Chrome developer tools. Stetho provides the developers with the facility of what can be known as intuitive debugging. 

Moreover, with Stetho, developers can get access to the data on layout hierarchy overview, database overview, outbound traffic and so on. Stetho is considered a systematic bridge for Android app developers. 

● Gravity View

Gravity View is an advanced UI component that makes use of sensors for image titling. Furthermore, the use of motion sensors, it allows the users to carry out multiple tasks through device rotation. One of the initial applications made by Gravity has “Fynd.” Android system requires greater than the 3.0 version to use Gravity View, and that could be used by non-gyroscope devices by Accelerometer sensor. 

CONCLUSION:

It’s a fact that Android app development is never complete without the use of a number of libraries. With that said, android developers have to build more applications in a minimum time span without affecting the quality. This proves to be one of the main benefits of the different Android libraries. Considering the list of best Android libraries, developers and teams might get confused while looking for the ideal platform according to the requirements. This quick guide makes sure that the developers do not have to worry about the available options. 

Android app development is leading the industry exceptionally, considering the millions of active applications it has on Google play. Thus, it becomes important to accelerate the development process, reduce primary investments and improve the application quality using other developers’ experiences. 

Also Read: iOS App Dev: Which Are The Six Best Libraries?