Third Party SDKs Used by Top Mobile Apps

There is an unlimited choice of SDKs available in the market. SDK offers relief to the developers. You are willing to develop an app that comprises countless lines of code for embedding functionality in your app. However, SDK provides you with a set of functionality in just one package.

Tips for Selecting an Appropriate Mobile SDK for Your App 

As the mobile industry has evolved, the amount of third-party SDKs has reached its peak. As a developer, it is a blessing as well as a challenge to embed an SDK in your code. Let’s look at the tips; that will help you in selecting a suitable SDK for your app:

1. Make a list of features to be included in your app. Note, they are the must-have functionalities.
2. Selecting an appropriate SDK for your app is a skill. Before developing an app, use the tool to see which SDKs your competitors are using.

For instance, you can use apptopia or app x-ray to examine the SDK used by your competitors.

1. Validate your selected SDK, and analyze which SDK has real reviews and which is from real developers.
2. If you find an SDK that can reasonably solve a couple of challenging behavior, but at some cost, then go for it.

A fully functional SDK with a premium plan is better than any free SDK with any crash or bugs in it.

1. Further, shortlist your SDK from the list of SDKs for similar functionality. SDK that makes app permission is highly recommended.
2. Before adding to your code, test the behavior of that SDK. Check for the vulnerabilities that can badly affect your app performance like app crashes, functionality bugs, apps slowing down, excessive battery consumption, allowing malicious threats.

Third-Party SDKs 

Here, I will discuss the third-party SDKs used by the top mobile apps, i.e.,

1. Facebook SDK
2. Crashlytics
3. Google Analytics
4. Amazon S3
5. AWS Mobile SDK
6. Stripe SDK
7. Flurry

Facebook SDK 

• Facebook SDK is an open-source library that helps you to build engagement with social media. There are Approximately 14.78% of apps integrate Facebook SDK in their application. It is the easiest way to integrate your app with Facebook. It enables Facebook Login: To validate the Facebook account.
  Sharing Statuses: Gives you the facility to enable sharing content to your Facebook account.
• App Events: You can log events in your application.
• Graph API: Read/write to Graph API. You can get data in and out of your social graph.
• Ads: Depending on the type of targeted audience, using ads, you can reach them and increase the engagement rate.
• App Invites:  You can send invites to the desired audience from your app.
• App Links: Link the shared story or status, back to your app.
• Audience Network: Monetize your app with Facebook ads.

The features are specific to iOS or Android.  It can be installed on Android (Requires Android API 15), Unity(Requires Unity 5), React Native, as well as in iOS. Depending upon the type of environment you are working in, Facebook SDK provides you with marvelous that help you in making a social network within your app.

Top Apps Using Facebook SDK 

1. Crashlytics 
2. Google Analytics

Google Analytics lets you analyze user interaction with your app and get relevant records. It gathers data from various environments and devices and reasonably computes the overall statistics. The main features they provide are:

• Mobile App Analytics: Get to know the insightful data from your audience.
• Data Import: You can get data in the form of a table.
• Reporting Automation: It saves your precious time and cost by automating complex reporting tasks.
• Turn Insights into Action: By setting your goals, which results in real gain from your insights.
• You can fix the current issues by exploring new ways.
• Custom Variable: To refine analytics, you can use name-value pair tags that can be inserted into your tracking code.

You can signup for free to enjoy the services initially. However, to further explore your statistics, you can subscribe to its premium package. You can test, adapt, and achieve your actionable goal. You can also generate reports and graphs of your analytics just a few clicks away. Google Analytics is available for Android as well as for iOS (you need iOS developer SDK and Google Analytics SDK for this). The provided link will let you know the whole procedure of using it. At Vizteck, we use google analytics SDK for apps that have anonymous users. If we have logged-in users, we encourage you to use the mixpanel SDK although it is paid.

Top Apps using Google Analytics

Google Analytics SDK has over 961M total reach collectively for Android and iOS apps (at the time of writing). Some of the notable customers are,

AWS Mobile SDK 

1. You can add Amazon Lambda for the mobile backend for both iOS and Android apps.
2. For your JavaScript-enabled app, you can use Amazon Mobile Analytics.
3. Using Amazon Kinesis Recorder, you can stream data in iOS and Android apps.
4. Amazon DynamoDB Object Mapper is used for transferring data on iOS, Android, and Unity apps.
5. You can do files transfer using Amazon S3 Transfer Manager in iOS, Android, and Unity apps.
6. AWS services for Mobile analytics in iOS, Android, and Unity are done by using Amazon Mobile Analytics.

This SDK lets you work on any platform like iOS (iOS7 SDK or for iOS8 and above), Android, Fire OS, React Native, JavaScript developers(Only Mobile Analytics SDK), Xamarin, and Unity It is the fastest way to build mobile apps on AWS Cloud. It is a proven solution that gives you awesome experiences across multi-platform and different devices.

Amazon S3

S3 provides you with highly scalable, secure, and durable cloud storage. Amazon S3 is easy-to-use object storage, with a simple web service interface to store and retrieve any amount of data from anywhere on the web. It is one of the services you can access using AWS Mobile SDK. This SDK provides many features:

1. It provides you with the facility to store or retrieve files.
2. You can upload an object or download it.
3. Using S3 you can track the downloads and uploads progress easily.
4. Can utilize pre-signed URLs to transfer objects in the background.

S3 SDK also provides server-side encryption.

Using the S3 Transfer utility, AWS Mobile SDK allows you to use S3 SDK in your mobile app.

For Android, you should setup up the Android Mobile SDK, create a bucket and then grant access to your S3 resource. You can follow the steps from here. For iOS, you have to include the SDK in your iOS project. The best part is that you pay only for the storage you use. There is no minimum fee and no setup cost.

Tech Stacks using Amazon S3 

Stripe SDK

For iOS, you can choose a favorite method of yours to integrate into your app. Like, it has the support of CocoaPods, Carthage, and Fabric, as well as both static and dynamic frameworks.

In the Android app (Requires version 4, with no external dependencies), Stripe SDK let you accept payment from your Android app. They have created a library for Java developers, which facilitates you in sending card credentials to and from the servers. At the backend, a token is associated with every credit card transaction. Finally, this token will then receive by your app helps you with recurring billing or it may reuse for your future transaction.

Tech Stacks using Stripe SDK 

Flurry from Yahoo

Flurry is the most promising SDK used to integrate Flurry Analytics in your code. It is owned by Yahoo developers. You can record, monetize, advertise and get better revenue by using Yahoo tools. Flurry lets you monitor your activities across your app. It ensures you the best solution for the app experience. You can then interact with your active users. You can track, experience, and monetize your app performance anywhere, anytime using Flurry. Flurry grows with you. You don’t have to worry about supporting yourself at any scale. They ensure you the best solution for data-driven decision-making. It empowers all your employees to analyze the data with ease to expand your business. The main features that Flurry provides are

1. Events: It facilitates you to track your in-app actions, and then gain insights from how they are using it.
2. Funnels: Flurry facilitates you in driving data from how your users progress through specific paths in your app. You can point out the issues, and where they bounce back.
3. Retention: You can retain your audience by understanding the percentage of customers who come back to your app.
4. Segments: Analyze the behavior of app users for different apps. It helps you understand which type of audience or users are more valuable for your app.
5. Interest: You can get your user's intention and interest.
6. Demographics: It lets you explore the demographic data about your app users.
7. User Acquisition Analytics: Explore your user’s acquisition efforts and measure the result of using it in your app.

The SDK of Flurry can be used effectively for any iOS, WatchOS, or tor vOS As well as for Android. You can enable Flurry Analytics, and Flurry Ads Serving, and do complex analysis of your app with ease.