We indexed some top mobile apps and the SDKs they use | Hacker News Reader

We indexed some top mobile apps and the SDKs they use

medium.com

57 pointsIamFermat42 comments

I analyzed the app frame works from the linked article here is the result when the count is larger than one, first column is usage count among popular apps.

      2 Adjust SDK
      2 Formatter Kit
      2 Google Maps SDK
      2 Google+ SDK
      2 Hockey SDK
      2 Mantle Framework
      2 PLCrashReporter
      2 Pop Animation Engine
      2 PSPDFKit
      3 AFNetworking
      3 BPXLUUIDHandler
      3 FLAnimatedImage
      3 Google Conversion Tracking SDK
      3 Google Mobile Ads SDK
      3 Masonry
      3 SocketRocket
      3 Tune SDK (Mobile App Tracking)
      4 Card.io SDK
      4 Cocoa Lumberjack
      4 OpenCV
      4 TTTAttributedLabel
      5 Eigen
      6 Bolts Framework
      6 Crashlytics
      6 Fabric
      6 Facebook SDK

analytics, analytics, analytics, ads, analytics, analytics

google maps, social network login, OCR tool.

Admittedly this is tiny sample set. Would be interesting to look at top 50 apps across all categories and then top 50 by each categories.

Also 2 Stripe which occurs slightly more than other payment platforms. Got 1 Braintree (PayPal), 1 visa, 1 Alipay...

One more interesting take-away - Uber has both Adjust and TUNE(Mobile App Tracking)'s SDK. Lyft has both Kochava and TUNE(Mobile App Tracking)'s SDK. All these SDK's do Attribution analytics (where are my app installs coming from). I wonder if app installs are so importnat to Uber and Lyft that they need 2 SDKs each doing the same thing to keep each other's data honest?

It's possible they are running advertising campaigns with ad networks that are only integrated with one of these attribution partners? I know I've started to see a lot of uber interstitial ads in games that I didn't use to.

That's a good point. Not all attribution vendors work with all ad networks so they might have to use a few to get coverage.

TUNE is not part of Facebook's Mobile Measurement Partner program, though they do offer workarounds for this. This likely means Lyft and Uber are using TUNE for non-Facebook attribution, and Adjust / Kochava for Facebook.

Awesome insight! That would explain it!

Can I make a request? Can you do a slice on the top 50 gaming apps? As a game maker, I'd be curious to see what are the most used SDKs.

We'll probably throw all the data up on appsight.co site and let folks do the filtering themselves. Sign up on the site now and we'll alert you when we launch for Beta.

In case anyone wants a tabulated view. https://gist.github.com/mdubbs/41c19c5384ee0386465cff19aa800...

Thanks! Btw, I think not all your counts are correct. AFNetworking has a count of 6, not 1.

Whoops! Should be fixed now, thanks.

Hey there, nice work! I worked on a similar project for Android. Currently, there are about ~3k apps added: http://www.libtastic.com/

Thx! Just checked out libtastic. Pretty fantastic :)

We have been doing SDK Recognition for a couple of years here at Apptopia, and it's absolutely not as easy as it's being portrayed here (i.e. run this GIT library). The technology requires constant attention, maintenance and improving otherwise you very quickly find yourself missing analysis for 65-70% of an app's SDKs. In fact, we have recently re-built our SDK Tech completely as we found previous methods (what we call "Binary Analysis") were extremely inaccurate and resulted in over 20% missed SDKs.

The comparison of Uber and Lyft is interesting. Our latest recognition for iOS shows Uber with 6 currently installed and 6 others uninstalled since 2013. Lyft made a lot of updates on May 9 and has 8 installed and 12 uninstalled. The only SDK that they are both currently using is SocketRocket.

Screenshots from our tool of the specific SDKs recognized: Uber: https://www.evernote.com/l/Aro4rGREdBJI_a80JzIRKZ3z2P8BwM3SG... Lyft: https://www.evernote.com/l/ArrWkfAF3OxGWqcsnrCRtgSnRKgSfwH0I...

We offer free trials at www.apptopia.com where you can look at SDK data for over 1 million apps in 196 countries.

Fascinating. On my wish list is which SDKs use location in some way. A real pain on iOS to understand permissions (super easy in Android)

This is very similar data to what's available on our site, AppBrain. If you're interested in more like this, the top ad networks and developer tools are updated daily at http://www.appbrain.com/stats/libraries and each individual app also shows the SDKs it uses at bottom of the app page, eg. Instagram: http://www.appbrain.com/app/instagram/com.instagram.android

It seems in the dataset from OP more different SDKs are detected than we do at AppBrain. We invite anyone to report missing SDKs will definitely review the current presented set to add our omissions!

These lists leave out some important frameworks these apps are built on. For example, Pinterest links AsyncDisplayKit. I'm curious how this data is collected. If Keyword matching against known popular public frameworks, it might be worth expanding your queries to include all public CocoaPods.

Yeah good catch. The SDK list we scan against isn't comprehensive. It doesn't have AsyncDisplayKit (I just added it to the list). Great suggestion on Cocoapods, we'll be adding those. We'll publish more comprehensive list on our site AppSight.co once we launch our closed Beta. Would love your feedback too at that point.

What could Uber and Lyft be using OpenCV for?

It's a dependency of card.io/PayPal

Credit card number scanning.

I had the same question too. I was thinking it was to process all the avatar images. Card.io dependency makes a lot more sense :)

This is some cool data. Am surprised how often AFNetworking and Crashlytics are used. Unsurprisingly, for advertising, FB and Google Ad SDKs totally dominates. I signed up. When will you be launching the site with full data?

Yes, I'm especially surprised that major players give their data to Twitter by including Crashlytics.

Crashlytics is like the only bright spot out of the whole Twitter product suite. Or major players don't see Twitter as a threat at all anymore. Not like FB

Surprised to see so much use of AFNetworking. Is it really necessary? Looking at the example code it doesn't seem to add much (these days), with the overhead of managing another sdk.

The most evident pro is saving you to type many more lines of code to implement the download or upload of a resource (json, image, etc.) from/to a web server.

It used to be a dramatically better API than what the system provided. These days it's debatable as to whether it's actually better than just using NSURLSession directly, but AFNetworking is well established as the default that everyone who has ever touched an iOS application knows how to use, and there isn't really any incentive for ripping it out of existing applications (and if you have a mix of old and new applications it's easier to just use the same networking API in all of them, so it continues to be used for new ones as well).

Is this an indication of anything other than popularity.

With programming languages, the general rule seems to be the worst win in the popularity contests (VB, PHP, MySQL come to mind).

I think it depends. You can draw some take aways if major apps are using a particular SDK - stability for example. Think about scaling. If uber has your SDK and you are logging events, you probably need a fairly meaningful infrastructure to do that.

Nice. Thumbs up. Would love to see a larger data set

Cool. Interesting to see Starbucks make the list considering I don't see that app mentioned too much

We indexed it exactly for that reason but also for the fact that it has one of the highest payment processing volume. So we were curious what payment processor they used.

I see. I remember reading about the Starbucks mobile payment system taking off even though they launched recently, I believe the Summer or fall of last year.

Interesting insight. Interesting that Uber and Lyft are the ones with the most numeber of SDKs by far.

This is pretty cool! The more data and/or apps the better!

Thx! We think people will find this useful too. Feel free to spread the word and have folks sign up at AppSight.co. Will have a lot more comprehensive data when we launch!

Android?

iOS only for now. Android coming very soon!

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