App Development’s Top 10 Open-Source iOS Libraries
If you know even the basics of iOS app development, you’d know that it is a tremendous undertaking.
Third-party libraries can save you a lot of time and work.
You don’t need to waste your time reinventing the wheel. Instead, you can easily incorporate these third-party, open-source libraries into your project and start your app rolling.
You can find libraries that can be used for UX, fetching photos, showing stylish navbars, and even for modern calendars. But, picking the most suited one from the pool of alternatives is tricky. Looking for Hire iOS Developers for your business needs.
To make your job easier, I conducted some serious digging and found the best 10 open-source iOS libraries. These will make app creation a snap.
How did I choose the top 10?
The list highlights iOS libraries that are the most popular among users. I did not entirely rely on my own judgment. I also took into consideration peer suggestions as well as data from CocoaPods. (CocoaPods captures anonymous user data after library installs.)
Now, let us get straight to work.
Top Open-Source iOS Libraries
1. Realm
Realm is a mobile database that runs on multiple platforms other than iOS. It runs natively inside phones, tablets, and wearables too.
And when it comes to persistence, it offers a superb cross-platform alternative to Core Data.
You get a data browser to explore the database files. And it is speedier, as well as easier to work with as compared to Core Data. Also, the library built a platform that syncs data between apps in real-time.
It is among the most common iOS libraries, and developers who wish to perform anything connected to data persistence must know about it. Looking for hire iPhone app developer in London for your business needs.
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SwiftlyJSON
Swiftly JSON performs exactly what the name indicates. It helps in fast processing JSON in Swift.
Parsing JSON in Swift is hard. But Swiftly JSON protects you from all the complicated ifs and typecasting difficulties that make deserializing model objects tough.
The optional wrapping is done for you automatically. And presumably that’s why it is the second most popular Swift library.
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Chameleon
Vicc Alexander’s Chameleon is a lightweight flat colour foundation for iOS.
However, don’t underestimate its power and potential. If you really have design in mind but don’t want to spend hours twisting your brain around RGB values, Chameleon is the library you’ll enjoy.
You may rapidly achieve the required color combinations and, hence, a stunning interface. And the proper colors that are easy to achieve with Chameleon also add to your user’s experience.
It’s also compatible with Swift and Objective-C.
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Kingfisher
Kingfisher is an asynchronous downloading library written entirely in Swift.And the lightweight library can be used for caching photos from the web.
It retrieves the relevant images from the URL and sends them to both memory and disk cache. And it is presented in UIImageView, NSImageView, NSButton, or UIButton.
A must-use if you are working with display images, it also offers some other choices. It shows placeholder images while downloading, shows a system indicator, and offers extensible image formatting, processing, etc.
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Hero
If you are working with an iOS view controller, Hero is the library that will be your savior. It is a breezy wrapper over UIKit’s complicated transition APIs. With Hero, custom transitions are no longer a hassle for developers.
It works by first inspecting the source and destination views for heroID. For matching view pairs, the transition from the old to the new state is done automatically.
In the case of unmatched couples, though, Hero can also produce animations. You can utilize the heroModifiers property to define animations. Also, make sure that user gestures may manipulate these animations interactively.
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RxSwift
If you are seeking for reactive programming in Swift, RxSwift is a simple, elegant, and powerful library for the job.
Its basic role is to simply enable the composition of asynchronous processes and event/data streams. You might regard it as a Swift side alternative for ReactiveCocoa.
Though it is relatively similar to Rx’s original version, some of its features have been changed for better performance. The changes also ensure that the integration with the iOS environment is pleasant.
RxSwift has a steep learning curve; but, once you get the hang of it, you will be pleased that you took the time to understand this gem of a library.
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AFNetworking
When you call a given API to get data from a server or database, the process is called networking. And this phone process is hardly something that you’d call convenient.
But that was before Matt Thompson chose to lead the AFNetworking open-source project and give iOS app developers a breather. AFNetworking is among the most popular open-source libraries and gets updated every day.
- It is lightweight,
- making iOS developers’ jobs easier,
- and is speedy too.
- It basically employs blocks and
- GCD (Grand Central Dispatch) and
- dramatically increases an apps’ responsiveness.
- It also optimizes the code
- with higher performance primitives.
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Alamofire
Alamofire is another popular HTTP networking library.
Another one? Is AFNetworking not enough?
Well, Alamofire is AFNetworing’s Swift-based cousin. And it is a wee bit trendier than its big bro. Also, it is totally built using Swift and has no evidence of inheritance from its Objective-C cousin.
Alamofire provides an attractive interface over Apple’s Foundation networking stack. And this simplifies many networking jobs. For example, network communication for a multiplayer game. And also, everything about JSONS (i.e., uploading, downloading, and obtaining) (i.e., uploading, downloading, and getting)
With this quick and effective library, you don’t have to bother with URLSession (though basic understanding would be excellent) (though basic knowledge would be good). And you can also greatly decrease boilerplate code.
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Lottie
Animations are vital. Period. But for iOS app developers, using UIView or CoreGraphics for animations is a hassle. It takes too much time, and it is no less than a task.
However, you can thank the guys at Airbnb because their open-source iOS library, Lottie, is coming for the rescue.
Lottie enables you load and render animations in the bodymovin JSON format and employ a designer’s creation in your app. With Lottie, parsing Adobe After Effects animations becomes a breeze. And your applications become a lot more exciting and memorable.
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MagicalRecord
Dealing with core data is cumbersome, complicated, and demanding. But, MagicalRecords open-source iOS library makes it exceedingly straightforward and even elegant.
It functions like a wrapper. Hiding all the irrelevant stuff from the developer. It basically cleans up the core data and enables rapid and simple one-line fetches.
It provides easy methods to wrap boilerplate code for set up, query, and update of fundamental data. Thus, making the developer’s job easy.
Also read: Mistakes to Avoid When Developing React Native Apps
