Being an Android developer is not a piece of cake.
It needs knowledge and understanding of the languages, libraries and what not. Due to the varied suite of development Android platform holds, it is necessary to crack what libraries and modules work best with current Android app development requirements.
To help the developers and ease out the process of development, we bring you the 22 most preferred Android library layers for developers. Let’s take a quick glance at the basics of Android libraries before we move ahead.
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.
Why do we need Android Libraries?
One of the major reasons for using these libraries is to expedite and optimize the Android app development process, i.e., develop an astounding app without any unnecessary or additional efforts. These new Android libraries for developers provide them with basic pre-written codes and other important elements that can be used instantly rather than performing these tasks from scratch.
So, if you have just started your career in Android app creation and want to know about popular libraries that are a go-to tool of almost every Android mobile app development company, then this article is what you need.
Top 22 Best Android Libraries for Developers in 2022
Android libraries, regardless of their stack or platform are a big game change in the field of digital software development. With efficient libraries by your side, you can leverage the tech functionality to its full potential with less boilerplate code. Therefore, here is the Android studio library list of best and latest Android libraries 2022 for Dependency Injector.
Before we start, why don’t we take a moment and understand what Dependency Injector is?
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.
11. Object Box
Object Box is a widely used Android databinding library that allows you to devote your valuable time to Various USPs of the product instead of storing and retrieving data. This library acts as an object oriented embedded database considered as a right alternative for SQLite. Since its documentations and portfolio are well defined, it is a perfect suit for IoT (Internet of Things) apps.
Debugging libraries
Almost an indispensable step in the app development process, debugging an application before its final release is as important as it gets. For this purpose, let’s have a look at some useful libraries.
12. Stetho
Stetho claims to be a “sophisticated debug bridge for Android applications”. The use of this library is not limited to just Network inspection, Database inspection, JavaScript Console, etc. but developers use it to have access to the Chrome Developer Tools features that are natively part of the Chrome desktop browser. Moreover, developers can choose to enable the optional dump app tool offering a powerful command-line interface to application internals.
13. Hyperlog-Android
This is a standard Android Log class for storing logs in an Android database library and push them to a distant server for debugging. It is also a utility logger library.
This library provides end to end visibility and helps to debug issues. HyperTrack SDK pushes log to the Hyperlog server, and the server makes use of ELK stack to process the logs and visualize them on Kibana.
Reactive Programming libraries
In Reactive programming, data is released from a component (a source if you will) to the other component known as Subscriber, assisting in handling asynchronous tasks efficiently. So in short, these libraries help with transferring data from source to subscribers. Some of the widely used Android app development libraries for this purpose are:
14. RxJava2
If you are looking for a library that helps you in implementing reactive programming (create reactive applications), then RxJava is an ideal choice for you. It is officially described as “a library for composing asynchronous and event-based programs by using observable sequences”.
This library is considered unbeatable by Android app developers because it simplifies the process to chain async operations, opens a more explicit way to declare how concurrent operations should work, is able to highlight errors sooner than other libraries, among other things.
Drawing libraries
There are hundreds of new libraries being developed every day, but very few are able to impress developers and prove potent. Here are some Android apps graphic libraries that have stood apart from the crowd.
15. MPAndroidChart
MPAndroidChart is an impeccable Android chart/graph view library. It supports radar, line, bar, bubble, pie, candlestick charts along with scaling, animations, and dragging.
