Best Android Libraries for Developers | Hacker News Reader

Best Android Libraries for Developers

cloudrail.com

89 pointsrwwt18 comments

The most commonly used Android libraries sorted by usage:

http://www.appbrain.com/stats/libraries/dev

Started looking into Android development a few weeks ago. This list is rather useful. Thank you!

Something small I wish I'd known when I started doing Android development - if you need to display images, use an image loading library (Picasso or Glide). It'll save you from dealing with a lot of quirks, some vendor specific.

More like "here's a list of random libraries, and we won't tell you why they're 'best'".

I downvoted a sibling comment. Then I read the list, said "I see what you mean", went back an undowned it. Sorry, thecupisblue.

I was hesitant to make a comment like that at first, but well, it is the truth.

Author of that blog post here: Thanks for posting it on HN and all that feedback. We wrote this post to provide a nice overview about good libraries our developers stumbled across the last years. So it is definitely not complete and I'm sure that I missed several great libraries. If you have suggestions, please comment here with the library name, quick description and link and I'll add them to the list. Thanks!

Well, this was useless.

Could you elaborate a bit? I think curated lists like these are good resources for developers that are unfamiliar with certain aspects of Android.

Curious to hear your thoughts.

I think it was in reference to it being a highly opinionated list. Especially since I've been developing for Android since 2010, and most of the actual "best libraries" were absent from this list.

Also, I've never heard of CloudRails (though they do seem interesting for certain use cases), but I'd never put them on a par with Retrofit, and leave out some of the more established names.

Exactly this. I've never heard of CloudRails, from my own development experience, on conferences or meetups or posts. Retrofit (1&2, Volley, those are the libraries that deserve mention there. "Database" category having just two libraries is like someone didn't want to bother, since Android has a lot of ORM libraries and also databases like Realm. Date & Time doesn't even have Joda-Time for android, DI links to Dagger which is deprecated in favour of Dagger 2, Functional includes only Retrolabmda, no even mention of RxJava and all the libraries surrounding it, Camera is missing some most popular camera libraries, Logging doesn't include the most used one - Timber, Image doesn't include Picasso or UIL... I don't feel like scrolling anymore, there is a lot missing, especially since the list is called "Best Android Libraries".

This was a useless list because many of the libraries here are outdated, the author did not provide reasoning or comparison against others.

iOS - https://cloudrail.com/best-ios-libraries-developers/

This list is missing the Support, Appcompat, and Design libraries from Google, although to be fair it's practically a given these days that a project will be using them.

LeakCanary is also missing, which is a shame as it's very easy to leak memory in Android by holding onto destroyed Activities. Every project I have installed LeakCanary in for the first time has had at least one memory leak, it's such a useful tool being able to automatically detect and record leaks.

Please remove https://github.com/akexorcist/Android-BluetoothSPPLibrary from your list. Its unmaintained and has tons of bugs.

Is it just me or is the scroll velocity super accelerated on that page? It's going at least twice as fast on ChromeOS

it is for me too (Windows 10 + Chrome)

Does Retrofit have an almost same counterpart in Swift?

One thing that comes close is Moya: https://github.com/Moya/Moya/blob/master/docs/Examples/Basic...

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