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By: Sagar Sharma

11 Best iOS Libraries that Accelerate iPhone App Development

iOS developers love the open-source libraries of the platform. Do you know why?

Advanced iOS libraries allow them to build robust iPhone apps in a hassle-free way and by saving a lot of time. 

These are ready to use libraries that developers can directly use during iPhone app development rather than creating an app from scratch. It benefits to developers to invest more time on designing the unique features and functions of the app. 

Using the iOS libraries, developers can improve the time-to-market of the app by achieving all milestones successfully. Credencys has proven expertise in developing iPhone apps for the diversified industry verticals. 

In this post, we have covered the 11 most promising iOS libraries that ensure the seamless iPhone app development. Integrate them into your iPhone apps to build the app faster. 

Top 11 Open Source iOS Libraries that Speed Up the iPhone App Development

1. AFNetworkin

It is the most reliable iOS library that helps developers in networking and seamless integration of APIs. AFNetworking is an open-source, lightweight and fast networking library that uses Grand Central Dispatch and blocks.

Basically, it helps developers optimize code with higher performance primitives, improve responsiveness of the app, and enable with the easier concurrency model. AFnetworking is used for macOS, iOS, Watch OS and TV OS. 

The library takes care of basic networking requirements to the advanced ones, including SSL pinning and Network reachability. It contains robust APIs that manage high-level networking abstractions effectively. 

2. Alamofire

Alamofire is an HTTP library that is developed on the top of NSURLSession. It is the best library to simplify the networking of your iOS app. Though many new libraries are out there, the Swift based Alamofire remains the prime choice of iOS developers.  

Using the utility methods of the library, programmers can handle all types of networking requests and creates a native-like networking interface using Swift. Moreover, it simplifies the many networking tasks such as making uploading, downloading and getting JSONS a piece of cake and providing network communication for a multi-player game. 

The unique features of the library include pause and resume networking operations whenever required, subclassable private storage that makes the iPhone app development conducive to programmers using Swift.  

Credencys used Alamofire in Anand Rathi, Market Place Application, IoT Solution, Samsung, Jeep

3. SDWebImage

Undoubtedly, AFnetworking is a fast and open-source library that allows to load images from the web seamlessly using AFNetworking and UIImageView. 

But, there is another library known as SDWebImage, an asynchronous image downloader with cache support. The library stores decoded, original and compressed image files on the disk and caches the UIImage in the memory. Thus, it helps free up the iPhone memory by offering advanced iOS image management. 

Credencys used SDWebImage in Jeep

4. Masonry

Masonry is a lightweight library that makes AutoLayout hassle-free using simpler syntax. To make the AutoLayout code more readable and concise, the library uses its own chainable DSL.  It provides different methods that shorten the dozens of code lines for AutoLayout to a single line. 

5. MBProgressHUD

It’s an ultimate library that addresses all the image related gaps that are not fulfilled by other image libraries. MBProgressHUD enables iOS developers with the class that allows them to display a translucent Heads-Up Display (HUD) over images with text. Moreover, during the image loading, it offers labels and progress indicators too.  

Thus, when the iOS app takes too much time in image loading or performing the tasks, translucent indicators of MBProgressHUD prevent your app from abandonment by relieving the user anxiety. 

Credencys used MBProgressHUD in Nuevacare, Hilco Global, Anand Rathi, Market Place Application, Samsung, Jeep

6. CocoaLumberjack

CocoaLumberjack is a complete solution for all your logging needs. It is a robust library that has more capabilities in comparison to the humble print or NSLog. It contains powerful features such as grand central dispatch, lockless atomic operations, and multi-threading. 

The library is easy to use and faster than NSLog as it allows to make functions with minimum coding. To allow developers to log to a file and console simultaneously, CocoaLumberjack send one log statement to multiple loggers. Due to its flexibility and simplicity, it is highly used in enterprise-level logging solutions for iPhone or Mac applications. 

Credencys used CocoaLumberjack in IoT Solution, Market Place Application

7. Kingfisher

It is a Swift based library for caching and downloading the images. Kingfisher improves your app experience by catching the downloaded images in both disk and memory. The amazing features of the library are independent components cancelable downloading that boost app performance and speed. 

Kingfisher perfectly caches the images that quickly display your app to the users by caching the images later. There are other extensions such as UIButton, NSImage, and UIImageView that help directly in setting an image from a URL. 

Credencys used Kingfisher in Anand Rathi, Market Place Application, IoT Solution, Samsung

8. SwiftyJSON

The name of the library itself suggests it helps engineers to deal with JSON data in Swift.  SwiftyJSON is a free, open-source and simplified library. It eliminates all the optional chaining that is messy for programmers. 

Almost all developers face such issues. SwiftyJSON is the perfect solution that provides a hassle-free approach that seemed tough to achieve earlier. Using this library, developers will no longer face the same error that directly improves their productivity and efficiency by allowing to create the code flawlessly. 

Credencys used SwiftyJSON in Hilco Global, IoT Solution, Market Place Application, Samsung

9. Eureka

It is the best iOS library that works as a form builder in Swift. Eureka is used in form intensive apps. It helps programmers to save time and efforts for creating forms with repetitive and complex code. 

Instead of performing the repetitive tasks to create the forms, the library allows to create highly dynamic forms with reusable code. Thus, developers need to write the code once and use the same code anywhere. 

Moreover, Eureka’s abstraction performs duplication and code validation. Being supported by a large developer community, it is the best updated iOS library.   

10. SnapKit

SnapKit is the very popular iOS library that makes the AutoLayout easier to create and setup. Written in Swift, it allows to build iPhone apps with less code compared to traditional methods. The result is the app has cleaner coding that is more manageable and easy to review. It has a safe design that makes that helps developers to minimize the errors and prevent them from invalid concerns. 

11. JSONModel

Most of the iPhone apps work using the internet and interact with the remote server to send and receive data every now and then. A few of them require a little bit of data while others consume massive data by interacting with a remote server on a continuous basis. 

These days all the apps use JSON to interact with a remote server. Here JSONModel plays its role. It is an open-source library that validates JSON data. Moreover, it helps developers to fetch the JSON from the server, parse it, and initialize your model classes with JSON response from the server. 

The core job of JSONModel is to display the data in JSON format when the server receives a request from the API. It is a real time-saver for programmers if they need to create a more complex data model. 

Crednecys Embraces Advanced iOS Libraries for iPhone App development

Credencys has a team of 50+ iPhone developers who have proven experience in developing powerful iPhone apps by integrating robust iOS libraries. It saves time for the developers in terms of creating the same features and functions again and again. The result is they focus on developing the most dynamic and complex features that add value to the ultimate user experience. 

Frequently Asked Questions about iOS Libraries

What is an iOS library?

The iOS library is a collection of code and resources. It compiles one or more iOS architectures too.  

What is the Swift library?

Swift based libraries provide a common framework for the development and testing in Swift for Swift applications and packages. 

What is the dynamic library in iOS?

Dynamic libraries are not linked to consumer-facing apps, so they won’t be the part of the executable file. Such libraries can be linked or loaded into an app when the app is launched or runs. 

What is the static library in iOS?

A static iOS library is a collection of compiled functions, resources, and classes that can be used by iOS developers for iPhone app development. Such libraries are complied binary or fat files and can be shared amongst the different projects.


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