My Top 5 Android libraries of 2016

Published in

AndroidPub

3 min readDec 22, 2016

This year, I decided to focus my strength on mobile app development. Android and iOS were the platforms I wanted to be proficient on. I had done a bit of Android last year and picked up learning Swift late last year too. It has been a wonderful experience so far and I couldn’t have made it by writing everything all by myself.

Here are the top 5 libraries (in no particular order) I used that made Android development seem like a walk in the park.

Sugar ORM

As the name implies, Sugar ORM is a sweet way to interact with the Android SQLite DB. If you’ve ever tried to interact with the DB yourself by using SQLiteOpenHelper you will agree with me that it just doesn’t seem right; There’s too much boiler plate code. Sugar ORM handles everything you shouldn’t really worry about, so that you can focus on your real business logic. You will not need to worry much about database creation and upgrade, entity relationships, and even SQL queries; It has its own QueryBuilder. Go check it out now.

Calligraphy

I bet you’ve tried to use a custom font for an app you’ve built in the past. Sadly the method Android provides is ugly. You’d have to do create a TypeFace and set it to your views individually. Read that again “…set it to your views individually”!?! Calligraphy makes changing fonts in your app a breeze and I’ve used it in 2 apps without much issues.

Retrofit

No need for big grammar here. Just port to Retrofit. Seriously, if you’re still using HttpClient and writing a Callback framework yourself…

ButterKnife

If I had a dollar for every findViewById(…) I wrote after using ButterKnife I’d be, well, homeless. ButterKnife helps you remove those ugly lines of code from your project; You can even bind OnClickListeners to buttons without ever needing to call the dreaded findViewById(…); no more ugly OnClickListener anonymous classes too. There’s even more you can do with the library. Hurry now, go check it out before you go too far into your new awesome app.

AndroidViewAnimations

I like to just call this library Yoyo. In fact, you can’t use the library without writing Yoyo. This library comes bundled with a ton of animation styles that you can apply on your views. Using it is sweet, just like playing with a Yoyo. The geek in me couldn’t hold myself, here’s a sample code:

https://github.com/daimajia/AndroidViewAnimations#step-2

YoYo.with(Techniques.Tada)
    .duration(700)
    .playOn(findViewById(R.id.edit_area));

And if you’re using ButterKnife, you won’t need to call the findViewById(…).

That’s it folks, picking only 5 was hard for me. I know you like to read short articles that’s why I had to take one for us. The current app we’ve launched uses over 50 dependencies (libraries) and it’s a bit unfair to pick just 5 :(. JodaTime, Android Support Library, Firebase Libraries and AppCommons are all worthy mentions, you should check them out too.