Ever since Google introduced Android for the first time in 2007, it became a massive hit in the smartphone OS market. It has been expanding since then and has its presence on various devices. This blog will discuss the top frameworks and libraries for android app development to be used in 2021.
Frameworks For Android App Development
There are many frameworks available for the android platform, including several cross-platform frameworks such as React Native, Flutter, and Ionic. Let’s discuss each one with its pros and cons.
Kotlin & Android SDK
This is an excellent language to work with. It has top-notch features such as null safety, extension features, Lambda and Coroutines expressions. App developers love the declined boilerplate code they have to script compared to Java & the optional semicolon at the end of each line.
You can only build apps for a single platform while using Kotlin. One can try using KMM for logic & API calling while it does not render anything for the cross-platform UI design, which requires using the native development kits only.
Flutter
This framework has been launched in 2017, which is quite decent than other cross-platform SDKs. However, it’s not that way for Dart, the programming language Flutter uses.
Dart is quite a programming language. It has a modern typesafe language with features such as extension methods, null safety, and higher-order functions, which help handle contemporary app development challenges.
Flutter permits app developers to make great UI experiences using its declarative & composable approach that simply works on iOS, Android, and web smoothly with an astonishing performance in all the platforms.
Flutter is pretty easy, to begin with, but it can be tough to deal with complexity for app developers with a functional programming mindset. At the same time, Flutter doesn’t support Apple Watch and Wear OS for now.
Flutter also won’t get any new functionality or UX update as soon as Apple or Google launches it, as Flutter doesn’t use the first part of UI toolkits rendered by Google & Apple rather than it does offer its widgets.
Providing its own widget helps Flutter to attain the same level of precision and performance on multiple platforms even though it won’t be first for UI/UX updates launched by the respective ecosystem owners.
React Native
After iOS & Android, this framework is the 3rd largest platform on which app developers have created apps. Indeed, it is one of the top cross-platform SDKs for apps. It is the preferred choice of a large community of JavaScript developers due to using JSX.
React Native uses real native platform particular components, unlike Flutter, which guarantees native appearance & performance. For which app developers need to script code only while getting support for iOS and Android platforms.
React native developers do whine about long hauls for developing binaries; simultaneously you can’t use the same code for web & other platforms.
Libraries For Android App Development
Libraries play a significant role in any framework’s development. It prevents the effort to build the things we frequently use during the development. Thanks to authors & a massive developer community, there are endless libraries available today. It is also said that the number of libraries available for frameworks shows its fame in the community.
Android Jetpack
Google announced a handful of libraries for native android app development, which helps follow best practices, prevent boilerplate code, and script code that works continuously across Android devices & versions. Here is the library chart we frequently use while building an android app.
Network
Retrofit
It is one of the best typesafe HTTP-clients for Java & Android. It is effortless to apply a common choice of developer. It also supports famous serialization libraries to choose from as per our needs.
Volley
This is built by Google. Volley supports the scheduling of network requests. If you seek a network client for all network functions, including picture loading, this will be a great choice.
Dependency Injection Frameworks
Dagger2 or Hilt
When coming to dependency injection, this library is leading the queue. Recently, the Android team has launched the latest version of it, known as Hilt. Dagger is a static dependency injection framework that operates based on annotations.
Koin
Koin is built in Kotlin. It takes less configuration than Dagger2. Koin also supports lazy injection & ViewModels, and it produces much less boilerplate code than Dagger 2.
Image Loading
Glide
Glide allows easy fetch, decode, show images, video stills, and animated GIFs. It renders a flexible API to enable developers to plug into almost any network stack. Several developers prefer glide due to its support of GIFs loading and video stills.
Coil
It’s the first picture loading library built in Kotlin, and it even supports Coroutines. Coil is lightweight, quick, user-friendly, and modern.
Fresco
Facebook supports this library. Fresco loads images faster than Picasso. It allows your app to run quicker and prevent the OutOfMemoryError.
Analytics & Crash Reporting
Firebase Analytics & Crashlytics
This is one of the top solutions in Android apps for crash reporting & analytics. It tracks the crash reports in real-time.
Overlap-Image-View
This is a flexible library that helps you create overlapping pictures in your android app. It supports all the famous image loading libraries such as Fresco, Coil, and Glide.
FCMHelper
Push notification using FCM has become a standard need these days. To make a Firebase notification service in only a few clicks, this plugin is created for Android Studio. This plugin will auto-generate configuration with metadata & notification services allowing app developers to apply with less effort.
Conclusion
Several frameworks and libraries are available out there for android app development. But this article mentions the top ones here. These libraries and frameworks will indeed help enhance the quality of android apps.
