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The ultimate list of tools and libraries for Android development

by bernt & torsten

I recently finished an Android App that uses Google Places API to show cyclists that visit Amsterdam where the nearest bike shop, hotel, atm are while working on this app I did research into Android Libraries and other Android resources, I kept a list of the libraries that I found interesting.

Depending on what you are looking for like a maps library, chart library, or a GUI interface, I have listed what I found below and you can visit the respective links to get a copy or read more. Here is the list of libraries.

Maps

• Google Maps Android API – Instruction on how to use Google Maps Android API
• Google Maps Android Maps Object – Maps are represented in the API by the GoogleMap and SupportMapFragment classes.

Google Places

• Google Places API Web Service – Get data from the same database used by Google Maps and Google+ Local.

Charts

• AChartEngine – Charting Engine.
• EazeGraph – An Android chart and graph library.
• WilliamChart – Android library to create charts.
• MPAndroidChart – A powerful Android chart view/graph view library.

GUI

• Pull to refresh – A swipe refresh layout is available in the v4 support library.
• Cardslib – Android Library to build a UI Card.
• AndroidStaggeredGrid – An Android staggered grid view which supports multiple columns with rows of varying sizes.
• AQuery – A light-weight library for doing asynchronous tasks and manipulating UI elements in Android.
• Flow – A small library that helps with describing an app as a collection of moderately independent screens.
• Crouton – Context sensitive notifications for Android.
• DragSortListView – Android ListView with drag and drop reordering.
• MaterialProgressBar – Material design ProgressBar with consistent appearance.
• AndroidFillableLoaders – Android fillable progress view working with SVG paths.
• NexusDialog – Library that allows you to easily and quickly create forms in Android with little code.

Ads Network

• AdMob – AdMob is a mobile advertising company

Backend

• Parse – Build your app on any platform.

ActionBar

• ActionBarSherlock – An extension of the support library designed to facilitate the use of the action bar design pattern across all versions of Android with a single API.
• FadingActionBar – Library implementing a fading effect for the action bar, similar to the one found in the Play Music app

Inputs

• Emojicon – Adds emoticons to your app.
• FloatingLabel – FloatingLabel Allows you to create a blow kind of EditText. Doesn’t have Gradle or Maven Support.
• MaterialEditText – Supporting Floating Labels, Single Line Ellipsis, Max/Min Characters, Helper Text and Error Text with Custom Colors.

Navigation

• MaterialDrawer – Simple take on a material design navigation drawer.
• PagerSlidingTabStrip – An interactive indicator to navigate between the different pages of a ViewPager.
• Page View indicator – Support for horizontally scrolling ViewPager.
• SlidingMenu – Library to create applications with slide-in menus.
• SlidingTutorial – Simple library that helps to create awesome sliding android app tutorials.

Animations

• Android-Transition – Allows the easy creation of view transitions that react to user inputs.
• Android-View-Actions – Makes creating complex animations for views easy.
• Android View Animations – Cute view animation collection.
• NineOldAndroids – Library for using the Honeycomb animation API on all versions of the platform back to 1.0.
• Rebound – Rebound is a java library that models spring dynamics.

Images

• Android-crop – Library project for cropping images.
• Android-Image-Filter – Library project for applying image filters easily.
• CircularImageView – Custom view for circular images while maintaining the best draw performance.

Loading Images

• Fresco – An Android library for managing images and the memory they use.
• Glide – An image loading and caching library for Android focused on smooth scrolling, Recommended by google.
• Picasso – A powerful image downloading and caching library for Android.
• Universal Image Loader – Asynchronous, out of the box loading and caching of images.

Notifications

• Android-remote-notifications – A Google GCM/Amazon SNS alternative using pull instead of push.

Communication

• Sinch – Use the Sinch APIs to enhance your app with Voice, SMS, Verification, Video, and Instant Messaging.

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Database

• DbInspector – Android library for viewing and sharing in-app databases.
• Realm – Realm is a mobile database, a replacement for SQLite & ORMs
• RestorableSQLiteDatabase – A wrapper to replicate android’s SQLiteDatabase with restoring capability.

ORM

• ActiveAndroid – Active record style ORM.
• DBFlow – Fast and powerful ORM with compile-time annotation processing.
• NexusData – Object graph and persistence framework for Android.
• ORMLite – Lightweight ORM Java package for JDBC and Android.
• Sugar ORM – Insanely easy way to work with Android Databases.

REST

• Retrofit – Retrofit turns your REST API into a Java interface.

JSON

• Gson – A Java serialization library that can convert Java Objects into JSON and back.

Testing

• AssertJ Android – AssertJ assertions geared towards Android.
• Robotium – Android UI Testing.
• Roboletric – Unit test framework to run tests inside the JVM on your workstation, not in the emulator.

[Tweet “The ultimate list of tools and libraries for Android development”]

Tracking

• Mixpanel – Analytics platform to analyze the users.
• MobileAppTracking – Tracking your marketing campaigns across multiple ad networks.

Utility

• Byte Buddy – Runtime code generation library with support for Android.
• EventBus – EventBus is a library that simplifies communication between different parts of your application.
• Otto – Event Bus for Android.
• Weak handler – Memory safer implementation of android.os.Handler.

Crash monitoring

• Bugsnag – Cross-platform error monitoring.
• Crashlytics – Easy crash reporting solution.

Networking

• Android Volley – Official Android HTTP library that makes networking easier and faster.
• Asynchronous Http Client – An Asynchronous HTTP Library.
• IceNet – Fast, Simple and Easy Networking for Android
• Ion – Good networking library for Android.
• IceSoap – Easy, asynchronous, annotation-based SOAP for Android.
• OkHttp – An HTTP+SPDY client for Android and Java applications.
• node-android – Run Node.js on Android.
• RoboSpice – the library that makes writing asynchronous network requests easy.

Wireless

• SmartGattLib – SmartGattLib is a Java library that simplifies the work with Bluetooth SMART devices.

Dependency Injection

• AndroidAnnotations – Java annotations with dependency injection.
• Butter Knife – View the “injection” library for Android.
• Dagger – A fast dependency injector for Android and Java.
• RoboGuice – Google Guice on Android,

Performance

• Best Practices for Performance – Android Official Training on Performance.
• Developing for Android – Chet Haase’s series, including Memory, Storage, UI Performance.
• Detect and Resolve Performance Problems on Android – Use multiple ways to detect and fix Android Performance Problems.
• Facebook Engineering blogs tagged android – Including many articles on performance.
• Performance Tips – Android’s Official Perf tips.
• Testing Performance of Mobile Apps – Part 1: How Fast Can Angry Birds Run? ##Articles

Game Development

• Libgdx – Cross-platform game engine and SDK. Open Source
• Rajawali – Android OpenGL ES 2.0/3.0 Engine.
• Unity – Cross-platform game engine for mobile.
• Vuforia – Augmented Reality library.

Worth Mentioning

• Android Support library – The Android Support Library package is a set of code libraries that provide backward-compatible versions of the Android framework API.
• Android Priority Job Queue – A Job Queue was specifically written for Android to easily schedule jobs (tasks) that run in the background, improving UX and application stability.
• Android Annotation framework – An Open Source framework that speeds up Android development.
• Caffeine – Speed up your Android development.
• Easy Rating Dialog – A plug-and-play android library for displaying a “rate this app” dialogue.
• Google Play Services – Overview of Google Play Services
• Gradle Retrolambda Plugin – A Gradle plugin for getting java lambda support in Java 6, 7 and Android.
• Guava: Google Core Libraries for Java – Google Core Libraries for Java 6+.
• Hiring a react native Developer – If you’re looking to hire a React Native developer, here are both the hard and soft skills you should be looking for
• RateMeMaybe – Asks the user if (s)he wants to open the Play Store to rate your application when certain requirements are met.
• Tape – A lightning-fast, transactional, file-based FIFO for Android and Java.
• ZXing Android-Integration – Open-source, multi-format 1D/2D barcode image processing library.

Resources

• Android Design in Action Video series The video series by Android Design Team of Google.

• Android DevBytes Video Series – It is the technical counterpart of Android Design in Action series.

• Android Hive Tutorials – Very good tutorials for beginners.
• Android Weekly – Newsletter with weekly information about Android.
• Android Asset Studio – Generator for icons and other assets.
• Android Toolbar – A Toolbar for use within application layouts.
• Android UI design resources – It gives you a wide variety of design resources.
• Android-blogs – List with blogs about Android.
• Developing for Android – Article about what you need to consider when developing for Android.
• Device Art Generator – Wraps app screenshots in real device artwork.
• Material Design Palette – A Palette to pick the hex code colour for your material design.
• Pencil Project – An open-source prototyping software.
• Square libraries – Multiple high-quality libraries by square.

Alternative development framework

Android development may not be enough for you, there are other alternatives, especially where cross-platform development can be useful. If you have an app or developing one and want to reach as many devices and platforms, you should consider cross-platform development. There are several options available to you, you can use C# or HTML, CSS and Javascript to build an app, here is some suggestion:

• Anko – Anko is a library that makes Android application development faster and easier.
• Apache Cordova – Cordova-based applications are, at the core, applications written with web technology: HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
• Corona SDK – Framework to create native iOS and Android Apps (especially Games).
• Groovy on Android – Introduction to Groovy on Android.
• Groovy Language Support for Android – A Gradle plugin to support the Groovy language for building Android apps
• Ionic Framework – A framework to build hybrid apps with mobile-optimized HTML, CSS and JS with AngularJS.
• Macroid – A modular functional UI language for Android.
• NativeScript – An open-source framework to build native iOS and Android apps with JavaScript from a single code base.
• React Native – A framework for building native apps with React by Facebook.
• Reapp.io – Cordova-based framework to build hybrid apps with mobile-optimized HTML, CSS, and JS with ReactJS.
• Scaloid – Library for less painful Android development with Scala.
• SwissKnife – A multi-purpose library containing view injection and threading for Android using annotations.
• Titanium – Open-source framework to create ‘native’ cross-platform apps using JavaScript.
• Xamarin – Framework to create native iOS, Android, Mac and Windows apps in C#.