Android app development libraries

Since Google showed us Android the very first time in 2007, it has been the biggest whale of the smartphone OS market. It has been growing leaps and bounds with a plethora of different devices, which comes in hardware ranging from budget Android phones to Flagship state of the art devices and not just phones but it has a presence on our watches and TVs too. At MindInventory, we always brainstorm on how we can make apps that meet all the expectations, take all the loads without giving a damn about anything, How can we make apps that do a lot without a single hiccup? Here are a set of best Android app development frameworks and libraries and when they make sense to use. Frameworks to Use for Android App Development There are a plethora of frameworks available for the Android platform, which includes many cross-platform frameworks like Flutter, React Native to ones like Ionic. Let’s talk about each one with its ups and downs, starting with the default one. Kotlin and Android SDK Kotlin is an excellent language to work with. It has first-class features like Extension functions, null safety, Coroutines and Lambda expressions. Developers love the reduced boiler plate code they have to write compared to Java and the optional semicolon(;) at the end of each line is a delight. If one has to deal with different types of devices like Google TV, Wear OS wearable devices then they might not have any choices and have to go with Native development kits only as almost none of the cross-platform SDKs give support for these devices. On the other end, you can only develop for a single platform while using Kotlin. In the best case, one can try using KMM for logic and API calling while it doesn’t provide anything for the cross-platform UI design which needs to be done using the native development kits only. Flutter Flutter has been introduced in 2017, which is fairly recent when compared to other cross-platform SDKs. But it’s not that way for Dart, the language Flutter uses. Dart is quite a mature programming language. It’s a modern typesafe programming language with features like Null safety, Extension methods and Higher Order functions which is handy and useful in tackling modern app development challenges. Flutter allows developers to make great UI experiences using its composable and declarative approach which simply works on Android, iOS and Web seamlessly with surprising performance in all the platforms. Flutter is poised to be available for Desktop too soon. Google ran a contest named Flutter Clock Challenge to make clock faces using Flutter. Choosing Flutter would be no brainer for apps, it can be even added to existing apps using Flutter add-to-app. Flutter is quite easy to get started but it can be challenging to tackle complexity for developers who have a functional programming mindset. On the other hand, Flutter does not support Wear OS and Apple Watch as of now. If you want to utilize your code in different form factors like TV and Wearables then Flutter doesn’t work on them just yet. Also, Flutter won’t get any latest functionality or UX update as soon as Google or Apple releases it as Flutter does not use the first party UI toolkits provided by Apple and Google instead it does render its own widgets. Rendering its own widgets helps Flutter to achieve the same level of accuracy and performance on different platforms although as mentioned above it won’t be first for the UI/UX updates released by the respective ecosystem owners. React Native After Android and iOS, React Native is the third largest platform on which developers have built apps. Undoubtedly, it is the leading cross-platform SDK for mobile apps. It is the preferred choice of a large community of JavaScript developers due to the use of JSX. Unlike Flutter, React Native uses real native platform specific components, which assures native appearance and performance. For which developers need to write code only once while getting support for both Android and iOS platforms. React Native is a tried and tested SDK with a number of well-known apps from Facebook. React developers do complain about long times for building binaries, at the same time you can not use the same code for web and other platforms. There is React.js for that on the other end UI made with Flutter simply runs on different platforms without much hiccups. Libraries for Android App Development Libraries play a major role in the development of any framework. It reduces the efforts to develop the things we use most often during the development. Thanks to authors and a large developer community, we have countless libraries available with us. It is being said that the number of libraries available for frameworks shows its popularity in the community. Let’s discuss the library that we are using here at MindInventory. At Google I/O 2018, Google has announced a collection of libraries for native Android app development. It helps us follow best practices, reduce boilerplate code, and write code that works consistently across Android versions and devices. Below is the chart of libraries we are using most often while developing an Android app. Dependency Injection Frameworks Dagger2/Hilt When it comes to dependency injection, Dagger2 is at the top of the queue. Recently the Android team has released the newer version of it as Hilt. Dagger is a static dependency injection framework that works on the basis of annotations. Koin Koin is developed in Kotlin. It takes less configuration compared to Dagger2. It supports lazy injection and ViewModels and it generates much less boilerplate code than Dagger 2. Network Retrofit It’s one of the best type safe HTTP-clients for Android and Java. It is very easy to implement a common choice of developer. It also supports popular serialization libraries so we can choose according to our requirements. Volley Volley is developed by Google. It supports the scheduling of network requests. If you are looking for a network client for all the