8 Best Android Libraries that every Android Developer should know


Introduction

Android operating system is used across a wide range of mobile devices. The market share of android operating systems is around 70 % as compared with others. So it is good to start developing android applications so that you can reach out to this huge audience by building android applications. Many times while building an android project we use different types of libraries within our project to implement some complex functionalities easily. An application might contain different libraries used within it. Libraries are generally used to reduce the amount of code which developers might have to write to perform some specific task. In this article we will take a look at 8 Best Android Libraries that every android developer should know.

1. Retrofit

Retrofit is a REST client library which is used to make Rest API calls within android applications. We can use this library for android applications built using java as well as kotlin. This library is used to deserialize the JSON using Plain old Java object which is used for JSON structure. With the help of Retrofit while making an API call we don’t have to parse the JSON response instead of that it directly returns us the object from that JSON response.

2. Volley

Every application which is making network calls within it is using APIs to consume the data. For implementation of APIs we have to create a modal class within our project to parse the data from JSON which we received from API in the form of response. Every time we have to create a kotlin class for different APIs. For this task we can simply use the JSON to Kotlin class plugin which will generate the kotlin data class when we add a JSON response to it. This plugin will help us to reduce the efforts which are required for performing repetitive tasks.

3. Picasso

Picasso is one of the widely used open source libraries which is used to load images from URL within our mobile application. This library is managed by Square. We can easily load images from the URL using this library. Along with that this library provides an error handling method using which we can display another image when we get any error from the image URL which we have to load the image.

4. Glide

Glide is also similar to that of Picasso. It is also used to load images from URL within our android application. This library is managed by bumptech and it is also backed by Google. Many Google applications on play store are using this library. Glide also provides support for image caching and provides low memory impact when loading images. This library also provides support to load GIF images.

5. Lottie

Lottie is a library which is used to display animated vectors within our android application from a JSON file. Many times in our android application instead of displaying still images developers prefer to display animated images to make application UI look beautiful. This library also adds animations to the images based on the user interaction with the images.

6. Butterknife

Butterknife is a library which provides different annotations for creating a boilerplate code for Android. This library is developed by Jake Wharton and easy to access. This library helps in creating bindable and drawable based strings for the views and other data sources. Using this library we can reduce the usage of onClick and onTouch while developing an android application.

7. Room

Room Library is used to save data locally in a local database. This library is used in case to cache the relevant piece of data so that when the device is not able to connect to the network user will still be able to browse the content when not connected to the network. This library provides abstraction layer support over SQLite database which allows fluent database access while providing full power of SQLite.

8. CamView

CamView is a library which is used to easily access the camera of the android device. This library also provides support for embedded QR code Scanner within it so that we can also scan QR code through camera lens. CamView makes the camera accessing process easy by initializing the camera, capturing images and also helps in orientation changes while capturing images.

Conclusion

In this article we have taken a look at 8 Best Android Libraries that every Android developer should know while developing any android application. These libraries will help you to make your developing of android applications a lot more easier.

Updated on: 17-Feb-2023

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