List of Best Android Libraries to Use in 2021

Planning to develop an Android app for your business but not sure if you should engage professional mobile app development services? See, when you hire a rookie app developer without any experience, you may be able to reduce cost but cannot guarantee top-quality results, which can haunt you later. On the other hand, with experienced developers by your side, you can count on their expertise and holistic guidance.

Further, being experts in their domain, they have the knowledge and hands-on experience in working with top-notch technologies and tools, such as Android libraries, which a rookie developer, in most cases, cannot claim to possess. As these tools aid and accelerate the app development process, you should better hire professionals who are proficient with the tools and technical aspects for app building.

So, in this blog, we tell you the top Android libraries to be used by professional developers in 2021. But before that, let us see what android libraries are all about. Let us dive into it!

What Exactly Are Android Libraries?

To explain in a simpler term, Android libraries consist of code libraries or resources used for building features or functions into an Android app. Since they contain pre-written codes, UI components, documentation, message templates, and configuration data, these libraries expedite the app-building process.

So, because of the swiftness they add to the app development project, developers today fall back on third-party libraries to save their time and effort. Further, to pick the best library for their purposes, the developers may look into the credibility of the author, how active the community is about maintenance of the library, and of course, how well written it is. A good number of developers using a library can be a reliable indicator of the quality support it offers.

Considering your basic idea is now clear, let us check out the popular Android libraries used by the app developers.

Here are the best libraries developers may use in 2021…

Dagger 2

Created by Square and maintained by Google, Dagger 2 is the best dependency injection framework for Android. If you are wondering what dependency injection is, here is a quick definition for you. This process is all about providing or injecting the dependencies to an object that it requires to function rather than constructing them itself.

Coming back to Dagger 2, it analyses and verifies dependencies by relying on Java annotation processors. It is way ahead of other DI frameworks because Dagger 2 can generate automatic code at compile time, thereby making it more apt for managing dependencies for apps. This framework also builds dependency graphs and handles challenging dependency injection requirements of larger applications.

As DI frameworks are important for enhancing the performance of your app, make sure the developer you have hired is equipped with the right tools. The best way to go about it is to count on the proven experts, say from a top mobile app development agency in India to handle this technical area.

EventBus

When building an Android app that comprises multiple active components interacting with one another, developers may fail to simplify the communication between them. However, this open-source Android library can facilitate better communication between fragments, threads, and services, using lesser code but ensuring better quality.

Packed with high-performance features like annotation-based API publisher & subscriber inheritance, EventBus allows loose coupling that makes apps easier to maintain as well as debug. It also has advanced features like subscriber priorities and delivery threads which help avoid app life cycle issues.

For those of you who don’t know, loose coupling is an approach that explains how components are connected but are not dependent on each other within a system, Android apps in our case. So, when you engage Android app development services, chances are, the experts take of this minimal dependency approach to make your app more fast, adaptable, and efficient.

Glide

One of the widely used Android image libraries is right here! When the developers want to ensure smooth and quick image loading for their apps with a single line code, they fall back on Glide. Effective in displaying, fetching, and resizing remote images, it also emphasises smooth scrolling of images in Android apps.

Glide’s easy-to-use API will let developers plug into any network stack and accelerate the speed at which images are decoded. By minimising storage overhead and excessive garbage collection (while decoding the images), this tool makes sure that images appear quickly to deliver a great user experience while using an app. Additionally, Glide supports decoding and displaying animated GIFs and video stills in applications.

So, do you want to hire a developer who has a working knowledge of such popular libraries? More importantly, how do you hire experienced and dedicated app developers for the long term? To find answers to all your queries, read “Factors to Consider While Hiring Android App Developers”.

Activity Recognition API

One-of-a-kind, this API library is widely used in time tracking apps that are deliberately designed to detect when the users start and stop activities like walking, standing still, running, and cycling. So, what happens is that smartphones utilise sensing data right from the accelerometer integrated into the mobile to detect the user’s activity – you may call this process passive sensing.

The API library is efficient enough to use low power sensors and minimise the power usage of an Android phone. Further, to save battery, activity reporting can stop if the mobile is ‘Still’ for a long period. Once it moves again, the reporting resumes. Added to that, the library has the “IntentService” feature to deliver updates at the specified intervals through the Broadcast Receiver.

With all these capabilities, the Activity Recognition Transition API has saved developers from the hassles of spending considerable engineering time for combining several signals like locations or sensors. No denying that apps have got smarter as they can now detect user activities without draining the battery.

Retrofit

Developed by Square, Retrofit is called the type-safe HTTP client that creates and processes HTTP request via a REST API. Based on annotations for autogenerating codes, it helps reduce the requirement of boilerplate code (repetitive codes without no variation). Further, the library leverages the core functionalities of OKHttp, a third-party library for receiving and sending HTTP-based network requests.

Given these features, the library can handle a bunch of functions like caching, making connections, threading, retrying failed requests, and response parsing, and error handling. Very thoroughly documented and well-planned, Retrofit may be called a battle-tested tool that saves the professionals from several developmental hassles.

We mentioned REST API a while back, remember? Want to know more about it? If yes, then you may check out our blog right here “Best Practices to Build RESTful APIs For Mobile Apps”.

Closing Thoughts

Here are they – our top picks for the list of Android libraries! These are just some of the many arsenals aka tools in the weaponry of Android developers for ensuring a smoother and faster app development. And to leverage these libraries the best way possible, it’s a must you partner with a professional team that has a solid track record of building quality apps using cutting-edge tools and techniques. Hope your mobile app project becomes a success while saving your precious resources. Wishing you the very best!