If you have ever programmed, you may have been involved in a situation when coding that part was difficult, time-consuming, and exhausting for you. Or you want to create an interest in the Android application, which you cannot create by code. At this time, Android libraries will be opened. But we will review what the Android library is and what it is used for.
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Android Programming
As we reviewed in the Eclipse article, Android is one of the most widely used operating systems today, and from January 2012 to July 2020, the share of the Android software market and its users has grown from 23% to 74%. For this reason, it can be said that programming in the environment of the Android operating system is a lucrative job. One of the features of Android programming is its open source and availability for everyone. In general, Android programming is a money-making branch with no limits. Google has announced that there are currently 2.5 billion active Android devices in the world.
Android libraries
If you have worked a little in the world of programming, you have heard the name library a lot. Libraries refer to things that are supposed to make coding easier for us. More formally, a library is a collection of pre-built rules and code that can be used while programming. Libraries exist in most programming languages, but each language’s library is different from the others.
The main job of libraries is to make coding easier and add features to the program. For example, you may not be able to perform multiplication operations in Android programming. But there are special Android libraries for this task in Android programming that allow you to do this. Libraries are written by programmers all over the world and made available to all developers.
Why should we use the library?
As mentioned, the library adds positive and good features to your program and on the other hand makes coding easier for you. But there are other major reasons for using libraries in programming.
Existence of prefabricated codes
You may encounter a situation during programming that is difficult and time-consuming to code. Libraries have solved this problem.
Higher stability
All the codes in these libraries have been written by the best programmers around the world and have been tested and implemented many times. So you can be sure of their stability.
Higher security
To maintain the security of your application, it is necessary to follow a series of rules. The libraries have rules inside them that make the features and facilities of the application not exceed a certain limit.
The best Android libraries
1- material-intro-screen library
Material-intro-screen is an Android library for creating slide intro pages.
2- TapTargetView
TapTargetView is an attractive library that allows you to create a view to introduce different parts of the application and display the description of that part or button or… to the user.
It is very easy to work with this library, and two code samples have been placed in this library’s Github, where you can see its features.
3- Skeleton
The skeleton is a loading display library similar to Facebook and Alipay that you can use for your activities.
4- ShineButton
ShineButton is a library for adding effects to UI in Android. You can use this library for actions like like or dislike
5- Particle
Particle is a different library for creating animation on the logo or name of the application, which you can use in the splash pages of your applications and add a special charm to your application.
6- ExoPlayer
ExoPlayer is a famous library for working with multimedia files created and supported by Google. Using this application, you can add the possibility of playing music or video to your application.
7- folding-cell-android
Folding-cell-android is a material library for creating expanding content cells, which you add to your application to expand in an attractive way to display the full content of a section.
8- ViewpagerTransition
ViewpagerTransition is an attractive library for creating dynamic sliders that will display the content of each slide in a very attractive way.
9- Picasso
Picasso is a famous and complete library for working with images on Android. This library caches the images upon receiving the images for the first time and will call the image later when called through the cache. Of course, it has many features such as displaying loading, displaying the image before loading, and the replacement image in case of an error, etc.
10- flexbox-layout
Flexbox-layout is another attractive library from Google that will give you the ability to create FlexboxLayout and by using this library you will be able to create attractive FlexboxLayouts.
11- ShimmerRecyclerView
It’s a custom implementation of RecyclerView that renders beautifully when data is loaded. RecyclerView control has an adapter that you can use to work on the appearance of the view.
12- Android-SwitchIcon
This library extends the AppCompatImageView control and allows placing any icon (even in vector format) for the SwitchIconView using the app:srcCompat attribute.
13- FadingTextView
This library allows the text of the TextView to change automatically every second.
14- Shortbread
This library generates program shortcuts for activities and methods marked with @Shortcut. You don’t need to manipulate the manifest file; create an XML file or use the Shortcut Manager. You only need to annotate those parts of the code you want to be called as a shortcut.
15- Material About
The latest library helps you easily create an “About Me” page and introduce yourself to your users.