StackTips

Android Third Party Libraries and SDK’s

stacktips avtar

Written by

Editorial,  15 min read,  2.95K views, updated on Sept. 17, 2023

Over past few years, the age of mobile development become an fiercely-competitive world of serious money making business. Android developers network is growing rapidly. As the network grows, there are many open source libraries available. Although using someone written code is not be recommended always, but sometimes it helps in getting the application quicker to market.

This post outlines some of the popular third party Android Libraries and SDK’s.

If you find some Library is missing from your favourite list, or discovered a new one, just drop us a comment. We will add it to the list.

User Interface Libraries

ActionBarSherlockActionBarSherlock is an extension of the support library designed to facilitate the use of the action bar design pattern across all versions of Android with a single API. ActionBarSherlock was widely used before Google introduced AppCompact.
ActionBar PullToRefreshActionBar PullToRefresh provides an easy way to add a modern version of the pull-to-refresh interaction to your application.
Android PullToRefreshThis project aims to provide a reusable Pull to Refresh widget for Android. It was originally based on Johan Nilsson’s library (mainly for graphics, strings and animations), but these have been replaced since.
View Pager IndicatorPaging indicator widgets compatible with the ViewPager from the Android Support Library and ActionBarSherlock.
Nine Old AndroidAndroid library for using the Honeycomb (Android 3.0) animation API on all versions of the platform back to 1.0! Animation prior to Honeycomb was very limited in what it could accomplish so in Android 3.x a new API was written.
A Chart EngineAChartEngine is a charting library for Android applications. It currently supports all major and widely used chart types.

Android Networking Libraries

okHttpHTTP is the way modern applications network. It’s how we exchange data & media. Doing HTTP efficiently makes your stuff load faster and saves bandwidth.
VolleyVolley is an HTTP library that makes networking for Android apps easier and most importantly, faster. Volley is available through the open AOSP repository.
Android Asynchronous Http ClientAn asynchronous callback-based Http client for Android built on top of Apache’s HttpClient libraries. All requests are made outside of your app’s main UI thread, but any callback logic will be executed on the same thread as the callback was created using Android’s Handler message passing.
Google GSONGson is a Java library that can be used to convert Java Objects into their JSON representation. It can also be used to convert a JSON string to an equivalent Java object. Gson can work with arbitrary Java objects including pre-existing objects that you do not have source-code of.
RetrofitRetrofit is a type-safe REST client for Android and Java. This uses annotation to describe HTTP server calls. This is an elegant solution for managing REST API calls in in android application.
Fast Android NetworkingFast Android Networking Library is a powerful library for doing any type of networking in Android applications which is made on top of OkHttp Networking Layer.

Image Downloading And Caching Libraries

PicassoA powerful image downloading and caching library for Android.

Example

Universal Image LoaderUIL aims to provide a powerful, flexible and highly customizable instrument for image loading, caching and displaying. It provides a lot of configuration options and good control over the image loading and caching process.

Example

Database Helper Libraries

ActiveAndroidActiveAndroid is an active record style ORM (object relational mapper). It allows you to save and retrieve SQLite database records without ever writing a single SQL statement. Each database record is wrapped neatly into a class with methods like save() and delete().
ORM LiteObject Relational Mapping Lite (ORM Lite) provides some simple, lightweight functionality for persisting Java objects to SQL databases while avoiding the complexity and overhead of more standard ORM packages.
Green DOAGreenDAO is an open source project to help Android developers working with data stored in SQLite. GreenDAO does all the SQLite helper work for you. It maps Java objects to database tables (often called ORM). This way you can store, update, delete, and query for Java objects using a simple object oriented API.

Other Android Libraries

Android Anotaion FrameworkAndroidAnnotations is an Open Source framework that speeds up Android development. It takes care of the plumbing, and lets you concentrate on what’s really important. By simplifying your code, it facilitates its maintenance.
EventBusEventBus works on publisher, subscriber model similar to Observer design pattern. This helps in hassel free communication between Activities, Fragments, and background threads.
OttoAn enhanced Guava-based event bus with emphasis on Android support. Otto is an event bus designed to decouple different parts of your application while still allowing them to communicate efficiently.
DraggerDragger is a faster dependency injector for Android and Java