Top 10 Android Libraries and Tools for Android Development.

Dec 17, 2019

With the never-ending evolution and advancements in the field of software technology, the development and evolution of things are happening at a faster rate. And hence, with time it has become essentially important to keep an eye on android libraries and tools for android app development. Android libraries are coming equipped with everything that is required for the development of an app, i.e. from source code to resource files.

Other than that, it is completely up to the user to hire a smart android developer (who is skilled enough) and ask him to use these Android libraries and tools wisely. So, here is a list of the top 10 Android Libraries which may help you or your hired person to develop your android app:

Layout Manager Group

This library, which is the most preferred android libraries, it provides a set of Layout Managers for RecyclerViews to accomplish certain features and special effects. The library has short and limited documentation so, to know it better, you can check sample apps that show how it implements its code in activities and fragments. Moreover, the layout manager group has been released under Apache 2.0.

Moshi

This library converts JSON into Java and Kotlin models. As it supports Kotlin models, it is quite faster and is able to predict exceptions. It also supports JSON API. JSON API is a document required to build APIs. Most of the APIs we work on are written using this specification only. Moshi makes our work easier by converting JSON API into JAVA objects.

Chuck

It is an HTTP Android inspector that allows you to dive deep into your application’s HTTP history on your mobile phone. The log of HTTP activity is displayed as a notification on your phone. You can click on the notification to expand and open full Chuck UI.

While using Chuck library, your quality assurance department will be able to dig into any issue that is resting on the Android or the backend side. Sometimes, Chuck sounds more useful Logcat because the HTTP history still persists even if the app is killed. Whereas Logcat cleans history after the app is restarted.

Timber

Another simple and powerful library in our list and one of the most useful android libraries is Timber. Timber has been built on Log class in order to offer you easy logging on or off. It supports logging formatted strings and exceptions. Timber is the most used library these days. Almost every Android projects use Timber for its beneficiary logging support.

AnimatedPieView

It is a useful Android library amongst the best Android Development libraries, which used to display pie and ring charts on Android. This tool offers us the following features:

It provides alpha animation on touch.

AnimatedPieView fits text field position itself during an animation.

It transforms between a pie and a ring chart.

AnimatedPieView offers animation while drawing the chart.

It sets clearance angle, description and shows it for every paragraph.

Moreover, AnimatedPieView has also been released under the Apache-2.0 license and comes equipped with documentation as well.

RxJava

This library is a Java implementation of ReactiveX API. It allows you to arrange tasks and events into the series. Nowadays, users expect modern apps to update automatically. At this condition, RxJava comes into the picture.

It fetches real-time data. Though RxJava is quite hard to learn, but its functions are admired by developers. It merges multiple API calls such as switches threads and handles errors with much ease. When used with Kotlin, the API works even better with additional extension functions.

Tumbleweed

Released under Apache 2.0 license, Tumbleweed allows you to create smooth projections on every attribute from every object in your projects. Moreover, Tumbleweed has the following modified features-

It has decreased the mutation of Timelines and Tweens

Tumbleweed has removed pooling which was a constant source of unexpected behavior.

It has enclosed interpolations by putting up specific types (TweenType).

With detailed documentation, it is a widely used library by android developers.

Dagger

Another module on our list is Dagger. Dagger library is a completely static and time-dependent injection framework. This dependency injection framework is a passage to provide smaller constituents with another model and stick them together with less effort. Though Dagger is really hard to understand but worth to learn as it helps you to avoid handling the dependency injection yourself.

While developing larger applications, it creates your dependency injection graph in compile-time through annotation processing. In 2017, even Google encapsulated a separate Dagger Android library which allows you to write less boilerplate code and inject dependencies easily.

ThreeTen

The date and time handling library for Android is none other than ThreeTen. It is a backport of JSR-310. It was included in Java 8 as a standard time package. No doubt, it works efficiently and its standard Android Calendar API is its plus point. When compared to the JodaTime library it has certain disadvantages. Based on method count and binary size, it is much smaller than JodaTime.

ThreeTen’s API is also a bit more concise than JodaTime’s API. While starting a new project it is recommended to use ThreeTen. But if you are already using JodaTime then switching to ThreeTen is not worthy.

PRDownloader

Last in our list is a file-downloader library. PRDownloader is a file downloader library for Android with pause and resumes support. It is used to download different types of files like image, video, pdf, apk, etc. Moreover, PRDownloader supports the following features:

It allows you to download large files.

PRDownloader has a pause and resumes option while downloading a file.

It helps you to check the status of downloading with the given download ID.

With PRDownloader’s simple interface, the library offers you to make download request.

While downloading a file, it gives callbacks for various tasks like onProgress, onCancel, onStart, onError, etc.

Additionally, PRDownloader supports proper request canceling and many requests can be made in parallel.

So, this list of top 10 android libraries and tools will surely help you get your work done effectively. There are many other interesting libraries like Goldfinger, Prince of Versions, and DBInspector. These libraries may also help you in fingerprint authentication, handle app updates, and view your databases respectively. Many other useful libraries also there that include Room, Android KTX, Glide, Retrofit, etc.

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