Libraries Used in the Top 100 iOS Apps

We actually scan millions of apps from the app stores. Here's a public view of the top 500 in US, and if you choose the cross-platform category, you can see apps like this. For example, "Pac-Man 256" is rank 28 (Unity), Amazon is rank 30 (Cordova), etc.

https://sourcedna.com/stats/

It's actually very difficult to accurately match code written in so many different languages as compilers discard a lot of the info you need. I spent a lot of time researching and evaluating different ways to fingerprint libraries, as well as reconstruct the boundaries of internal modules when there weren't any symbols.

We match code by using a similarity search across all components we've ever seen. Since code written in C can be compiled to x86 or ARM, we disassemble the code into an intermediate language. Then we reconstruct control-flow graphs, data dependencies, and other platform-independent features. We index these in a custom search engine, which allows quick lookup and matching.

It's very difficult, but ultimately a really fun problem to solve. Most of our engineers got started with exactly the exercise Ryan did here. :-)

I can't imagine ever seeing a non-native app in the top 100 with the exception of maybe ReactNative-based apps which is a bit of a grey area since it compiles into native.

However, iOS (afaik) doesn't quite have shared libraries like you would have on a Linux server and there's no point in creating a separate ObjC library that would add bloat to each Xamarin binary because the C#-to-ObjC transpiler can selectively generate the wrappers/proxies during compilation. Xamarin might not even use a code generator to do that because you can just include all the ObjC code with the transpiler and copy-paste include them into the project at will.

Similar to the cocoapods note, my guess is it's catching on much faster with the long tail than the most popular apps.

1. App was written a while ago and is only in maintenance mode

2. Developer got started early on and hasn't kept track of the industry

The latter often happens with internal dev kits, where someone drops a static library in (say, to add a wrapper) and then never updates the dependency. New apps inherit it when they use the internal dev kit.

In any case, here's the original gist, which doesn't seem to have the same problem: https://gist.github.com/ryanolsonk/e33bf9e89677da9fe8ce

Note that it may be skewed a bit since apps can get created but not published on the app stores (personal experiment, in-house app for a company). This does roughly align with our data on iOS though.

* Realm.io has successfully positioned themselves as a thought leader in swift development for iOS by producing solid blog content and leading the Swift SF meetups (+ contributing to open-source projects).

* Crashlytics/Fabric.io is more interesting -- my experience with them has been entirely word-of-mouth (but they have a big presence at Twitter's developer conference/WWDC/Google IO, too).

* Parse generally has interesting, high-quality technical blog content: (https://blog.parse.com).

- There's generally no dependency management, or you're forced into using Cocoapods, and using it in a bad way (binaries in your repo).

- You're at the will of the vendor for additional features (framework, Swift nullability/generics integration, bitcode), and, if they're even available, dependency bumps. This gets really painful. Every time I used a closed-source framework, it ends up being a nightmare.

This is compared to:

- Add line to Cartfile

- carthage update

- A little drag and drop

- Done, future releases will probably Just Work

You might have better luck with people that aren't necessarily "iOS devs", i.e. games, where using closed-source is more common and they might not even be using Xcode.

And...holy shit, they just raised their pricing by 5x. That's kind of insane. I was really on the fence about this at $500 / month, but if I really needed this now, I'd probably try building it myself. If you planned on paying for this for a year, that's $30k. Seems like you could recreate this for $30k, right?