Best Android app development SDKs, libraries and frameworks trending in 2021

Do you know, Google first showed us Android in 2007? This smartphone has been the largest whale in the OS market. Over time it is increasing leaps and bounds with a plethora of different devices, which range in hardware from budget Android phones to the flagship state of the art devices and have a presence not only on phones but also on its watches and TVs. Have you ever wondered what are the things used to make all such android apps that make your life a lot easier? From getting up in the morning to reaching office on time, everything happens on a few finger taps on some applications. These are known as location-based services apps.

We always brainstorm on how we can build apps that can meet all our expectations, carry all the weight without giving any information about anything, how can we build an app that is a Only do a lot without hiccups? Here is a set of the best Android app development frameworks and libraries and when they make sense to use.

Top Android App Development Frameworks

Let’s understand some of the top Android app development frameworks that simplify app development:

Lots of frameworks available for the Android platform, including many cross-platform frameworks such as Flutter, React Native such as Ionic. Let’s talk about each with fluctuations starting with the default.

Kotlin and Android SDK

Kotlin is one of the excellent languages to work with. It has first-class features such as extension functions, null security, Coroutines and Lambda expressions. Developers prefer less boilerplate code that they have to write than Java and the optional semicolon (;) at the end of each line is a pleasure. If one has to deal with a variety of devices such as Google TV, OS wearable devices, then they may not have a choice and they have to go with the basic development kit as almost no cross-platform SDK provides support for these devices.

On the contrary, you can only develop for a single platform using Kotlin. In the best case scenario, one can try using KMM for logic and API calling, while it does not provide anything for cross-platform UI design that should only be done using the basic development kit.

Flutter

Flutter is introduced in 2017, which is much more recent than other cross-platform SDKs. But this is not the way Dart uses the language flutter. Dart is a very mature programming language. It is a modern type form programming language that includes null protection, extension methods, and higher order functions that are beneficial and useful in meeting modern Apple challenges.

Flutter allows developers to create great UI experiences using its own creation and declarative approach, which works simply on Android, iOS and the web, with stunning performance across all platforms. Flutter is poised to be available for desktop soon. Google ran a competition called Flutter Clock Challenge to create watch faces using Flutter. Choosing flutter will not be an issue for apps, it can also be added to existing apps using the Flutter Add-to-App.

Besides that, Flutter does not support Wear OS and Apple Watch as of now. If you want to use your code in various form factors such as TVs and wearables, then Flutter does not work on them right now. In addition, Flutter does not receive any latest functionality or UX updates by Google or Apple, as Flutter does not use the first party UI toolkit provided by Apple and Google, instead it presents its widgets.

Providing your own widgets helps Flutter achieve the same accuracy and performance on different platforms, although as noted above it will not be the first for UI / UX updates released by owners of the respective ecosystems.

React Native

After Android and iOS, the 3rd largest platform is React Native on which developers have built apps. Undoubtedly, it is the leading cross-platform SDK for mobile applications. It is the preferred choice of a large community of JavaScript developers due to the use of JSX. React Native is a tried and tested SDK with many well-known apps from Facebook.

Distinct Flutter, React Native uses real native platform specific components, which assures native appearance and performance. For which developers will only have to write code once, gaining support for both Android and iOS platforms.

Android App Development Libraries

Libraries are the main sources that play a major role in the development of any structure. This reduces efforts to develop the things we use most often during development. Thanks to the authors and a large developer community for this, we have countless libraries available.

Dependency Injection Frameworks

1. Dagger2/Hilt

2. Koin

When it comes to dependency injection, Dagger2 tops the queue. The Android team has released a new version of it as Hilt. Dagger is a static dependency injection framework, which works on the basis of annotations.

Koin has been developed in Kotlin. It takes less configuration than Dagger2. This supports lazy injection and ViewModels & it generates much less boilerplate code than Dagger2.

Network

1) Retrofit

2) Volley

Retrofit is the best type of secure HTTP-client for Android and Java. A common choice of developer is very easy to implement. It also supports popular numbering libraries so that we can choose according to our requirements.

Volley is a network developed by Google. It supports the determination of network requests. If you are looking for a network client for all network operations including image loading, this would be a better option.

Image loading

1) Glide

2) Fresco

3) Coil

In Glide, it is easy to decode, show video stills, images, and animated GIFs. It provides a flexible API to allow developers to plug into almost any network stack. Due to its support of video stills and GIF loading, Glide is one of several developers.

Fresco is supported by Facebook. Expecting Picasso, it loads images faster. This allows your application to run faster and minimizes out of Memory Error.

Coil is the first image loading library in a fully built Kotlin, it also supports Coroutines. Coil is fast, light weight, easy to use and modern.

Conclusion

Based on the conclusion there are a lot of frameworks, libraries, SDKs for Android app development. But, we have tried to explain in some special way here. After knowing these settings, libraries and SDKs will definitely help you improve the quality of Android apps.