
Most Used SDKs in Top 200 Free iOS Apps - kilimchoi
http://mightysignal.com/top-ios-sdks
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uwemaurer
The Top SDKs for Android apps are listed here:
[http://www.appbrain.com/stats/libraries/dev](http://www.appbrain.com/stats/libraries/dev)

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shujito
How does that site knows which libraries are used on the apps?

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guelo
Probably by looking at the java package names.

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K0nserv
Pretty surprising to see Alamofire above AFNetworking given that AFNetworking
is the Objective-C variant and Alamofire is for Swift. That almost seems to
indicate that there are more Swift apps in the top 200 then Objective-C apps.
Of course one can use Alamofire in Objective-C, but that just seems like
making your life harder than it needs to be

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mightyshane
We found that interesting too. You can see the apps that upgrade from
Objective-C to Swift as well when they uninstall AFNetworking for Alamofire.
It's usually accompanied by a huge overhaul of a bunch of SDKs.

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besselheim
Very interesting - does anyone know exactly what techniques they use to gather
this data?

I'm guessing to some extent it must rely on a jailbroken iOS to get past the
.ipa code encryption, as with this similar analysis: [https://medium.com/ios-
os-x-development/libraries-used-in-th...](https://medium.com/ios-os-x-
development/libraries-used-in-the-top-100-ios-apps-5b845ad927b7)

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nekitamo
I'm not 100% sure, but I don't think ObjectiveC metadata is covered by the
Fairplay code encryption.

If that is the case, then you can just download the .ipas using iTunes, and
then run classdump ( [http://stevenygard.com/projects/class-
dump/](http://stevenygard.com/projects/class-dump/) ) on them to get a list of
ObjC classes. From the class names, you can then figure out which frameworks
are linked in the app binary.

No jailbreak required :)

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obj-g
I didn't do it at first, most probably did, but if you click through to the
Top 200 themselves and select an app, you can see all the SDKs the app uses.
Pretty cool.

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jasonlew
Yep. We've actually collected SDK data on around 350K iOS apps and over 1M
Android apps, and can scan new ones on the spot (Live Scan).

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willstrafach
this is cool stuff, we are doing similar things at beta.verify.ly (although
more of a security focus rather than BI)

how much fun did you have figuring out generation of kbsync and the crazy
iTunes otp / auth tokens? :)

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obj-g
Much love to AFNetworking and SDWebImage. Thanks for all the spare time you've
given me.

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zazpowered
Saved me so much time when I was developing my apps

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VOYD
I totally read that headline wrong at first glance, "TOP 200 most used SDKs
used in iOS apps" ;)

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stepanhruda
What surprised me:

* Spark-SDK – This is for controlling IoT devices, why does Snapchat, Netflix and Spotify ship this?

* Squareup – Do people use this over Stripe? Or what is the use case?

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dalbin
Yes, that's really surprising.

Maybe a name clash ?

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atishay811
I never heard about Fabric. Can't seem to understand what they do from their
website. There is no mention of what it does on the home page. Is this some
sort of an analytics library?

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stepanhruda
The branding is very confusing and ends up adding a bunch of buzzwords instead
of explaining what it is.

On a side note, why do people use closed source Crashlytics, when there are
open source solutions available (still run by for profit companies, but source
of their SDKs are open)?

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lentil
It's really quite a nice crash reporting product. I think that outweighs the
closed-source point for a lot of folks.

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obj-g
Totally agree. Once you get used to it, it's very well done and great UI.

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joshavant
Alamofire (an all-Swift library) is linked in 31% more of the top 200 free
apps than AFNetworking (an all-Objective C library). I guess Swift is still
making headway into Big Apps...

Also, 6 apps are still using ASIHTTPRequest, despite the last release being 5
years ago.

Worse still, 3 apps use a combination of ASIHTTPRequest, AFNetworking, and
Alamofire - that's a library that was abandoned 5 years ago, an Objective-C
library, and a Swift library. Oh man.

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topstriker515
Keep in mind that some SDKs have internal dependencies. Those apps could just
be linking a set of SDKs that happen to include those 3 networking libraries.

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serg_chernata
Very cool, I love seeing something like this as opposed to just asking people
what they recommend or looking at git activity alone.

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allsystemsgo
MBProgressHUD? Really? It's not that hard to write your own progress
indicator.

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zazpowered
Why even bother to write your own though if theres a good solution available

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chrisBob
Not viewable on mobile Safari. Is that some kind of joke?

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nekitamo
I was able to view it on mobile Safari just fine.

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frsandstone
This is amazing!

