
We indexed some top mobile apps and the SDKs they use - IamFermat
https://medium.com/@kevinleong789/here-are-the-sdks-top-mobile-apps-use-faf8e6e5cfee#.vssem43ud
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acd
I analyzed the app frame works from the linked article here is the result when
the count is larger than one, first column is usage count among popular apps.

"cat topmobilesdk.txt | tr "," "\n" | sed -e "s/^ //g" | sort | uniq -c | sort
-n"

    
    
          2 Adjust SDK
          2 Formatter Kit
          2 Google Maps SDK
          2 Google+ SDK
          2 Hockey SDK
          2 Mantle Framework
          2 PLCrashReporter
          2 Pop Animation Engine
          2 PSPDFKit
          3 AFNetworking
          3 BPXLUUIDHandler
          3 FLAnimatedImage
          3 Google Conversion Tracking SDK
          3 Google Mobile Ads SDK
          3 Masonry
          3 SocketRocket
          3 Tune SDK (Mobile App Tracking)
          4 Card.io SDK
          4 Cocoa Lumberjack
          4 OpenCV
          4 TTTAttributedLabel
          5 Eigen
          6 Bolts Framework
          6 Crashlytics
          6 Fabric
          6 Facebook SDK

~~~
sdneirf
One more interesting take-away - Uber has both Adjust and TUNE(Mobile App
Tracking)'s SDK. Lyft has both Kochava and TUNE(Mobile App Tracking)'s SDK.
All these SDK's do Attribution analytics (where are my app installs coming
from). I wonder if app installs are _so_ importnat to Uber and Lyft that they
need 2 SDKs each doing the same thing to keep each other's data honest?

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potatosareok
It's possible they are running advertising campaigns with ad networks that are
only integrated with one of these attribution partners? I know I've started to
see a lot of uber interstitial ads in games that I didn't use to.

~~~
sdneirf
That's a good point. Not all attribution vendors work with all ad networks so
they might have to use a few to get coverage.

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safdeep
Can I make a request? Can you do a slice on the top 50 gaming apps? As a game
maker, I'd be curious to see what are the most used SDKs.

~~~
IamFermat
We'll probably throw all the data up on appsight.co site and let folks do the
filtering themselves. Sign up on the site now and we'll alert you when we
launch for Beta.

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ogsharkman
In case anyone wants a tabulated view.
[https://gist.github.com/mdubbs/41c19c5384ee0386465cff19aa800...](https://gist.github.com/mdubbs/41c19c5384ee0386465cff19aa800e8d)

~~~
IamFermat
Thanks! Btw, I think not all your counts are correct. AFNetworking has a count
of 6, not 1.

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ogsharkman
Whoops! Should be fixed now, thanks.

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libtastic
Hey there, nice work! I worked on a similar project for Android. Currently,
there are about ~3k apps added:
[http://www.libtastic.com/](http://www.libtastic.com/)

~~~
IamFermat
Thx! Just checked out libtastic. Pretty fantastic :)

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mrobinson17
We have been doing SDK Recognition for a couple of years here at Apptopia, and
it's absolutely not as easy as it's being portrayed here (i.e. run this GIT
library). The technology requires constant attention, maintenance and
improving otherwise you very quickly find yourself missing analysis for 65-70%
of an app's SDKs. In fact, we have recently re-built our SDK Tech completely
as we found previous methods (what we call "Binary Analysis") were extremely
inaccurate and resulted in over 20% missed SDKs.

The comparison of Uber and Lyft is interesting. Our latest recognition for iOS
shows Uber with 6 currently installed and 6 others uninstalled since 2013.
Lyft made a lot of updates on May 9 and has 8 installed and 12 uninstalled.
The only SDK that they are both currently using is SocketRocket.

Screenshots from our tool of the specific SDKs recognized: Uber:
[https://www.evernote.com/l/Aro4rGREdBJI_a80JzIRKZ3z2P8BwM3SG...](https://www.evernote.com/l/Aro4rGREdBJI_a80JzIRKZ3z2P8BwM3SGrk)
Lyft:
[https://www.evernote.com/l/ArrWkfAF3OxGWqcsnrCRtgSnRKgSfwH0I...](https://www.evernote.com/l/ArrWkfAF3OxGWqcsnrCRtgSnRKgSfwH0I0k)

We offer free trials at www.apptopia.com where you can look at SDK data for
over 1 million apps in 196 countries.

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trekking101
Fascinating. On my wish list is which SDKs use location in some way. A real
pain on iOS to understand permissions (super easy in Android)

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thijser
This is very similar data to what's available on our site, AppBrain. If you're
interested in more like this, the top ad networks and developer tools are
updated daily at
[http://www.appbrain.com/stats/libraries](http://www.appbrain.com/stats/libraries)
and each individual app also shows the SDKs it uses at bottom of the app page,
eg. Instagram:
[http://www.appbrain.com/app/instagram/com.instagram.android](http://www.appbrain.com/app/instagram/com.instagram.android)

It seems in the dataset from OP more different SDKs are detected than we do at
AppBrain. We invite anyone to report missing SDKs will definitely review the
current presented set to add our omissions!

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stillmotion
These lists leave out some important frameworks these apps are built on. For
example, Pinterest links AsyncDisplayKit. I'm curious how this data is
collected. If Keyword matching against known popular public frameworks, it
might be worth expanding your queries to include all public CocoaPods.

~~~
IamFermat
Yeah good catch. The SDK list we scan against isn't comprehensive. It doesn't
have AsyncDisplayKit (I just added it to the list). Great suggestion on
Cocoapods, we'll be adding those. We'll publish more comprehensive list on our
site AppSight.co once we launch our closed Beta. Would love your feedback too
at that point.

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augustt
What could Uber and Lyft be using OpenCV for?

~~~
sdneirf
I had the same question too. I was thinking it was to process all the avatar
images. Card.io dependency makes a lot more sense :)

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sdneirf
This is some cool data. Am surprised how often AFNetworking and Crashlytics
are used. Unsurprisingly, for advertising, FB and Google Ad SDKs totally
dominates. I signed up. When will you be launching the site with full data?

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manmal
Yes, I'm especially surprised that major players give their data to Twitter by
including Crashlytics.

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IamFermat
Crashlytics is like the only bright spot out of the whole Twitter product
suite. Or major players don't see Twitter as a threat at all anymore. Not like
FB

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svarrall
Surprised to see so much use of AFNetworking. Is it really necessary? Looking
at the example code it doesn't seem to add much (these days), with the
overhead of managing another sdk.

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plorkyeran
It used to be a dramatically better API than what the system provided. These
days it's debatable as to whether it's actually better than just using
NSURLSession directly, but AFNetworking is well established as the default
that everyone who has ever touched an iOS application knows how to use, and
there isn't really any incentive for ripping it out of existing applications
(and if you have a mix of old and new applications it's easier to just use the
same networking API in all of them, so it continues to be used for new ones as
well).

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collyw
Is this an indication of anything other than popularity.

With programming languages, the general rule seems to be the worst win in the
popularity contests (VB, PHP, MySQL come to mind).

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IamFermat
I think it depends. You can draw some take aways if major apps are using a
particular SDK - stability for example. Think about scaling. If uber has your
SDK and you are logging events, you probably need a fairly meaningful
infrastructure to do that.

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wodahs02
Nice. Thumbs up. Would love to see a larger data set

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xufi
Cool. Interesting to see Starbucks make the list considering I don't see that
app mentioned too much

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IamFermat
We indexed it exactly for that reason but also for the fact that it has one of
the highest payment processing volume. So we were curious what payment
processor they used.

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xufi
I see. I remember reading about the Starbucks mobile payment system taking off
even though they launched recently, I believe the Summer or fall of last year.

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wayneotau
Interesting insight. Interesting that Uber and Lyft are the ones with the most
numeber of SDKs by far.

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mxuribe
This is pretty cool! The more data and/or apps the better!

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IamFermat
Thx! We think people will find this useful too. Feel free to spread the word
and have folks sign up at AppSight.co. Will have a lot more comprehensive data
when we launch!

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Happpy
Android?

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IamFermat
iOS only for now. Android coming very soon!

