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
| ActionBarSherlock | ActionBarSherlock 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 PullToRefresh | ActionBar PullToRefresh provides an easy way to add a modern version of the pull-to-refresh interaction to your application. |
| Android PullToRefresh | This 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 Indicator | Paging indicator widgets compatible with the ViewPager from the Android Support Library and ActionBarSherlock. |
| Nine Old Android | Android 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 Engine | AChartEngine is a charting library for Android applications. It currently supports all major and widely used chart types. |
Android Networking Libraries
| okHttp | HTTP is the way modern applications network. It’s how we exchange data & media. Doing HTTP efficiently makes your stuff load faster and saves bandwidth. |
| Volley | Volley 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 Client | An 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 GSON | Gson 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. |
| Retrofit | Retrofit 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 Networking | Fast 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
| Picasso | A powerful image downloading and caching library for Android.
Example |
| Universal Image Loader | UIL 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
| ActiveAndroid | ActiveAndroid 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 Lite | Object 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 DOA | GreenDAO 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 Framework | AndroidAnnotations 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. |
| EventBus | EventBus works on publisher, subscriber model similar to Observer design pattern. This helps in hassel free communication between Activities, Fragments, and background threads. |
| Otto | An 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. |
| Dragger | Dragger is a faster dependency injector for Android and Java |
