iOS App Dev: Which Are The Six Best Libraries?

The mobile app development industry has been increasing rapidly considering the use of smartphones at present, as the role of smartphones is now greater than just making phone calls. 

Furthermore, developers are now constantly building awesome applications for a number of domains loaded with relevant features making them easy to use. 

However, iOS application development is quite a task. To help with that, it is now possible for iPhone app developers to take help from many third-party libraries that help in saving a considerable amount of time and effort. 

With this, developers can easily integrate open-source iOS libraries into their projects without any hassle. Let’s get into it to learn about the most used and popular iOS app development libraries. 

SwiftyJSON

Developers have to work with JSON data, and Swift has a strict type of system. Explicit typing can be useful in avoiding mistakes, but it could be inconvenient when dealing with JSON and other areas where the types are implicit in nature. In this scenario, the library makes it easy to deal with JSON data in Swift. 

Hero

If you want to create transitions between iOS view controllers. This adds a declarative layer to the UIKit’s bulky transition APIs, which makes it simple for the developers to create transitions. Having more than 20K stars on Github, it allows the developers to create animations for unmatched views. 

Lottie-ios

Lottie is among the simplest ways to add animation to a mobile application. This is a mobile library for iOS and Android using minimal code to natively render vector-based animations and art in real-time. Furthermore, the library gives Lottie's component for iOS and has more than 20K stars on Github. 

PinLayout

PinLayout brings in highly robust layouting without auto layout. You can lay out NSView, UIView, and CALayer with the library. The library constantly updates itself and also has more than 2K stars on Github. 

SDWebImage

This library, SDWebImage, provides a cache-aware async image downloader. Furthermore, this has categories for UI elements such as UIImageView, MKAnnotationVIew, and UIButton for ease of use. If you are thinking about using it in SwiftUI, then you will need to check the library based on SDWebImage. 

Moya

If you are using Alomfire, then you should use this, also. This will make your code more beautiful. Basically, Moya is used to building a network abstraction layer that adequately encapsulates directly mentioning Alamofire. This must be simple to make every day’s tasks easy but comprehensive enough to complete complicated tasks simply as well. 

RxSwift

This is also one of the most used libraries, with around 22k stars on Github. RxSwift is a generic abstraction of computation using the observable interface to subscribe and broadcast values and other events from the observable stream. RxSwift is used to implement reactive extension standards in Swift. In simple words, the developers can see the changes in value. 

Reactive Cocoa

An objective C framework, reactive cocoa, get inspiration from reactive functional programming. Furthermore, the goal is towards a more flow-based and precise code. This is known as Functional Reactive Programming as it can combine multiple programming. Moreover, ReactiveCocoa features many built-in functions through which you will be able to transform the signal. Therefore, using ReactiveCocoa would be a tough yet rewarding task. 

Realm

Realm can be considered an alternative to SQLite and Core Dara, which operate directly on wearables, tablets, and phones. Being a mobile database, it helps you to explore database files; you can get a data browser that is faster and easier for your work. 

This is among the most used iOS libraries for developers, and it supports relationships, vectorisation, and generic. Being a popular open-source iOS library, it has launched a platform to sync data between applications. To conclude, Realm is mobile-first, simple, and fast. 

SwiftDate

Developers need to work with Dates, and sometimes it could be a mess. This is where SwiftDate can be of great help; this will help you to validate, compare, manipulate, parse, display and compare times, timezones, and dates in Swift. Furthermore, this has more than 3 million of CocoaPods downloads and 6k stars on GitHub. 

Almofire

This library should be used in the projects as its one of the most efficient ones. This is one of the most used libraries among iOS developers, with a considerable amount of stars and forks on GitHub. The library is an HTTP networking library written in Swift. This provides a lot of features such as Response Methods, chainable requests, JSON parameter encoding, and uploading different types of files. 

CONCLUSION: 

This guide has covered the main aspects of iOS app development, and we hope that you have found it helpful in every way. 

iOS developers have been experiencing intense competition as technology is constantly advancing. Traditional programming techniques can be easily eliminated in the market; therefore, it is important to keep yourself updated in those terms. To keep up with industry standards, you must think wisely. iOS open-source libraries can assist you in sharpening your skills. 

All in all, to stay at the top, you must use the best iOS libraries. Therefore, use the iOS list of libraries mentioned above, and choose the finest open-source iOS library as per the requirements to get the best possible results. 

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